Coronavirus could delay US presidential election results by a week as Americans opt for mail-in ballots
The current year is a significant one for American politics as the country is bound for a presidential election. But the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease has pushed politics to the back row as the US is coping hard with the devastating effect of the pandemic. Over 820,000 people have been affected by the coronavirus that causes the disease while more than 45,000 have died. It is now predicted that the pandemic could see the results of the big election scheduled in November being delayed.
According to a report on Yahoo News, more Americans are shifting to mail-in voting in states where such a thing is not traditionally practiced and that could see the election results getting delayed by a week or more. Public officials and advocates are already preparing for such an unprecedented situation. A debate is already doing the rounds that President Donald Trump could cancel the election. But experts have nullified such a possibility, thanks to the country’s robust constitutional norms.
Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, felt it will need a “culture shift”. In an interview, she said: “We should be prepared to wait at least a week before results can be certified.” Gupta, who looked after the Justice Department’s civil rights division between 2014 and 2017, said her organization would work in tandem with other bodies over the next many months to make people aware and prepared that the results of the election should not be expected on the night of the day it takes place, which is November 3. Gupta heads one of the oldest civil rights groups in the country.
“People are going to have to be able to be patient to wait for the results,” she said, cautioning: “That’s an uncomfortable position for a lot of people. The media’s not used to it. The public’s not used to it.”
She also said the election officials would have to make sure that every ballot is counted. “The danger would be if there is false pressure that gets built in and people are disenfranchised because of this false pressure,” she added.
With a number of state primaries deferred because of the pandemic and no certainty over when the situation will normalize, the public support for mail voting has also increased considerably. On April 7, Wisconsin authorities faced criticism from former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for physically holding the state primary despite the call for social distancing. During that primary, over 80 percent of the electorate sent ballots through mail. State health officials even saw seven new cases of infection emerging during physical voting.
A new poll released on Sunday, April 19, showed 72 percent support for holding the election through mails. In practice, though, it is easier said than done since among the six swing states, only Arizona has prior experience holding a majority of their elections through mail (79 percent of the vote in Arizona in 2018 was by mail, according to statistics compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights organization at New York University).
DNC Chairman Tom Perez prioritizes perfection over timing
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said during a recent interview with Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery” that he would rather get it right rather than getting it on time on the election day night. “If we have a vote-by-mail state that is really close, I would rather be in a position where everybody's vote got counted. I think that should be our gold standard, is that everyone who wanted to participate was able to participate,” he said.
Last month, too, Perez asked the states to allow their voters to cast ballots by mail in the remaining primaries.
Pennsylvania, a key state, is set to have its primary on June 2 after the pandemic saw its original schedule getting shifted from April 28. As of Monday (April 20), the state received nearly 300,000 applications for mail ballots, as per the data received from the office of the secretary of state. Over 100,000 requests came for absentee ballots.