Off The Editor’s Desk – 8-12-2020
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What type of ballot do you prefer?
With the Coronavirus pandemic still hitting the population hard, come November how would you like to vote in the presidential election. Like, we always have done, go to the polling place and cast your ballot in a voting booth or ask for an absentee ballot to be sent to your home. But, the new option is to have all the local municipal election officials send out ballots to every eligible voter in their districts.
I like to have things that work, remain the same and that is why I like going to the polling place to cast my ballot. But, I also feel the concern of many over COVID-19 and wanting not to be infected by it and stay at home and practice social distancing. The difference between mail-in ballots and absentee ballots is that everyone is supposed to receive the mail-in ballot, but the voter requests the absentee ballot, and the election official have the right address to send the ballot, too.
First I have a long list of reservations about sending a mail in ballot to every eligible voter in the United States. I prefer going to the polling place or requesting an absentee ballot from your municipal clerk. In the 2016 presidential election some 138 million people voted. That sounds like a large number, but it represents only about 55 percent of those eligible voters in this country.
Mailing in ballots puts a big load on the post office and I would ask everyone how many times in your recent memory have you found someone else’s mail in your mailbox. It happens more than you would think in our mailbox and so if you receive more than one ballot because of an error by the post office, what would you do? I think some people would vote twice or more and that will make the job of the local election officials even more challenging trying to verify that ballot.
There is also the problem with addresses. Ten years ago, we did not get any paperwork from the Census department and we have not received any paperwork for this year’s census. That is because we live at 305 Maple Street, but we get our mail from a post office box and many times we do not get mail that is addressed to 305 Maple Street.
One of the other reasons is that because just a little more than half of the people vote, the cost and energy it will take to send over 250 million ballots out will overwhelm every election precinct in the country and we will not know who won for many weeks or even know if all the ballots were counted.
Sunday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press carried a great story about the mail in election ballots and I would like to relate several of the items it touched on.
“Running a vote-by-mail election is surprisingly complicated, and there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. Validating and counting a deluge of posted ballots in an open and accountable way presents major challenge, one that only about a half dozen states are fully prepared for.
“The more complicated we make the ballot-casting process, the more stuff is going to go wrong,” said Wisconsin activist Karen McKim. Election management in Wisconsin is as decentralized as it gets, relying as it does on 72 county clerks, 1,850 municipal clerks and thousands of poll workers, McKim say it’s ‘unrealistic and unfair’ to expect those workers to be ready for a flood of absentee ballots in just a few months.”
The Pioneer Press story stated: “Chaotic events during this year’s primaries did not install confidence. Untold thousands of mailed ballots were rejected for multiple reasons including arriving too late to be counted.
“The system is buckling under the weight of the dramatic surge and demand for absentee mail ballots.” Said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, “It hasn’t been built to withstand that high of a volume.”
“In general, voting by mail is much less forgiving than the in-person method, where a voter’s identity is verified on the spot and any difficulties can be handled by poll workers.
“In Milwaukee, nearly 2,700 absentee ballots were never mailed because the election staff goofed and halted a batch printing of mailing labels. Wisconsin is now scrambling to add USPS bar codes to their system so ballots can be tracked through the mail.
“In Jefferson County, KY, the state’s largest, 3,848 absentee ballots were rejected in the June Primary due to lack of a voter signature.”
If you are concerned about entering the polling place on Election Day and did not request an absentee ballot, you can drive to the polling place and have an election officials bring a ballot to your vehicle. In Glenwood City a phone number is posted on the door of the polling place and you can call that number for a ballot. I would suggest that before Election Day you contact your municipal clerk if you would like to have a ballot brought to your vehicle.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton