The fight over access to the ballot was one of the most important stories in America in 2020.
The country faced a pandemic that both offered new barriers to the ballot box and exacerbated existing ones. After election day, America faced an unprecedented effort to undermine faith in the election results as Donald Trump and Republican allies baselessly claimed fraud and brought a flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to get election results overturned.
Even though those efforts have failed, Republicans have created a dangerous precedent, laying out the playbook for future losing candidates to refuse to accept election results. More immediately, Republicans may use the uncertainty Trump helped create to justify new restrictions on the right to vote.
Here are a few of the biggest stories around voting rights from 2020:
Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the election
As it became clear that a record number of Americans were going to vote by mail, experts warned that election officials would probably need more time to count and verify ballots after the polls closed, making it unlikely that Americans would know the winner of the presidential race on election night. Moreover, because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, they warned that initial election results might show Trump ahead, only to see his advantage slip away as more votes were counted. The uncertainty, they warned, opened a dangerous opportunity for Trump to claim victory before all votes were counted after months of falsely saying vote by mail would lead to fraud.
On election night, Trump did exactly that, making a late-night appearance at the White House to claim he won the election as votes were still being counted. In the days that followed – as Biden’s lead widened – the president and his legal team escalated claims of wrongdoing, alleging things such as that poll workers weren’t given adequate access to observe ballot counting. They began waging long-shot legal battles in both federal and state court, which rejected them overwhelmingly. Trump tried, and failed, to pressure some state lawmakers to override the popular vote in their state and award him electors anyway.
By December, Trump and his allies had lost dozens of cases in court across the country, but that didn’t seem to matter to many Republicans. A total of 126 Republicans in the US House, nearly two-thirds of the entire caucus, signed on to an amicus brief supporting a last-minute effort by Texas to block electors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia – all states Biden won. The US supreme court rejected the case, but the fact that so many Republicans were willing to embrace the claims underscored how the party embraced Trump’s baseless claims.
Switching to vote by mail
When America began shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear there was going to be a surge in the number of people who cast their ballots through the mail. That presented a huge problem for many states, including key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where vote by mail was not widely used before.
Loud alarm bells sounded early on. During an April election in Wisconsin, there were reports of voters not receiving their ballots on time while others waited hours in line to vote. In Pennsylvania’s June primary, there were reports of similar delays and election officials struggled to count the influx of ballots. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated states needed about $4bn to adequately conduct elections during the pandemic, but Congress allocated just a fraction of that in the spring, $400m.
As state election officials scrambled to get new procedures in place, a significant new problem for mail-in voting emerged during the summer. Americans began experiencing severe mail delays, a problem critics attributed to changes implemented by Louis DeJoy, a prominent Republican donor who took over the US Postal Service in June. Many worried that a poorly functioning postal service would disenfranchise many voters, who would not be able to get their ballots and return them in time to have their vote counted. In a remarkable admission, Trump said publicly that he opposed additional funding for the postal service because it would make it harder to vote by mail.
Facing several lawsuits and congressional inquiries, DeJoy pledged to reverse the changes and ensure timely delivery of ballots. As the election moved into its final months, there was a sprint to get voters to request and return their ballots as early as possible. State elected officials encouraged voters to return their ballots in person, either to an election office or to a ballot drop box. Some states, facing legal pressure, extended the deadline for returning an absentee ballot.
When election day arrived, those efforts paid off – there were no reports of widespread disenfranchisement because of the mail. And preliminary data shows Democrats’ focus on voting by mail paid off. Some of the places where voters were the most likely to return their ballots saw some of the biggest swings towards Democrats compared to 2016.
Drop boxes
Amid worries about mail service, Republicans in some places began cracking down on ballot drop boxes.
In Ohio, Frank LaRose, the state’s top election official, refused to allow counties to offer more than one location for voters to return their ballots, even as courts said there was nothing preventing him from doing so.
The most egregious example may have been in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally said in October that counties could offer just one ballot drop box. The decision meant that Harris county, home to 2.4 million registered voters, could offer just one location for voters to leave their ballots instead of the 12 it had planned. Texas already makes it extremely difficult to vote by mail, and the decision meant that voters in Harris cunty, one of the most diverse in Texas, had to travel long distances if they wanted to return their ballots in person.
The supreme court’s conservative turn on voting rights
The unique conditions of the 2020 elections unleashed a flood of litigation aimed at easing rules around mail-in voting. The suits, filed in large part by Democrats and voting rights groups, sought to suspend things like witness requirements for mail in ballots as well as state policies that allowed officials to reject a ballot based on a voter’s signature without first giving the voter a chance to fix the ballot.
Several of those cases reached the United States supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority kept restrictions in place. In June, for example, the court allowed Texas to keep in place a law that only allowed a certain group of voters to cast their ballot by mail. It also said Alabama could block some counties from offering curbside voting.
In the week before the election, the supreme court declined to overturn decisions from state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania extending the ballot receipt deadline. But it did overturn a federal court ruling doing the same in Wisconsin. In that case, Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion strongly suggesting that state supreme courts could do little to question state election laws because the constitution gives state legislatures clear authority over elections. The opinion alarmed many observers, who worried it could handcuff state courts from striking down suppressive voting laws in the future.
In a case not related to the pandemic, the supreme court also left in place a 2019 Florida law requiring people with felony convictions to repay fines and other court costs before they could vote again. Voting rights advocates challenged the measure, saying it effectively amounted to a poll tax and gutted a 2018 constitutional amendment eliminating Florida’s lifetime ban for people with felonies. An estimated 774,000 people in the state are blocked from voting because of the law, according to an estimate by the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped represent some of the plaintiffs in the case.
The decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, blocked some people from voting, “simply because they are poor”.
Attacks on the census
Even before the pandemic, the 2020 census, which aims to count every living person in America, faced enormous challenges. Advocates worried that immigrants, turned off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, would not respond to the decennial survey. They also worried about new technological changes – this was the first census where the government encouraged people to self-respond online.
An inaccurate census would be catastrophic. The survey is used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets as well as how $1.5tn in federal funds get allocated. Businesses and local governments also rely on the data to make decisions about where to open stores, build schools, roads and implement transportation routes.
When the pandemic hit, it upended carefully prepared census plans and the bureau had to pause operations. After initially supporting an extension in completing the survey, the Trump administration reversed course, and said it was going to try to complete the census on-schedule, even as the bureau fell behind. That decision was probably linked to a July memo in which the president ordered undocumented immigrants excluded from the data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. Several federal courts have since blocked the order, but the US supreme court reversed those decisions earlier in December without deciding on the merits of the memo, saying the suit was premature.
Deep concerns remain about the reliability of the data, given the Trump administration’s rush to complete the process. The consequences of the rush are likely to become clearer when the bureau begins to release data in the coming weeks.
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