From Georgia to Wisconsin, 17 million voters have been erased from the voter rolls in the past two years in a wave of purge-mania. Given the massive errors resulting from this latest push to purge, millions of citizens, come November, will not find their expected ballot in their mailbox.
Ohio's GOP purge-meisters have shown other states how cutting registration rolls can target voters of color. Voting process attorney Prof. Robert Fitrakis of Columbus State University, says, "We have a history in Ohio of deliberately using the absentee ballot in a partisan and racist way."
Fitrakis pointed out that George W. Bush's re-election victory in 2004 hinged on Ohio GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell disqualifying mountains of mail-ins with such excuses as, "Signature below line," i.e., part of the signature was not perfectly inside a box.
Many states have moved to same day registration (SDR) so that a wrongly purged voter may register on Election Day in the polling station. With mail-in balloting, kiss that key protection goodbye.
Federal law requires states without Same Day Registration to provide a provisional ballot to those who find themselves missing from the rolls on Election Day. While provisional ballots provide dubious protection (over a million were rejected in 2016), still, over a million were counted in 2016. Minorities, far more likely to have to vote provisionally than whites, will lose this protection: There is no such thing as a mail-in provisional ballot.
Bubble Trouble
Even if your mail-in ballot arrives on time and is accepted, your vote for President may still not count. The nasty secret of American elections is that we don't count all the ballots. The US has a huge problem with "residual" votes when the voter's choice is not readable by our counting machinery.
And once again, some voters are more "residual" than others. For example, the Brennan Center for Justice finds that in some races, African-Americans are five times as likely to have their vote disqualified for "over-voting" (making an extra mark on the ballot) than white voters.
Luckily, the "residual votes lost" has declined because of in-precinct scanners: voters put their ballot through the scanner which rejects it, or beeps, if it detects an under- or over-vote. With mail-ins, there is no scanner warning to the voter. The non-count will soar because mail-in voters make understandable errors such as marking an "X" next to their choice instead of filling in the little bubble.
Fixing Postal Voting
The Klobuchar bill requires (and funds) states to provide postage-paid return envelopes for mail-in ballots.
That's not enough. States must be barred from requiring witness or notary signatures. And states, like Wisconsin, must end their requirement that some voters must mail in a copy of their ID to request a mail-in vote.
Signatures should not be subject to challenge unless there is a report filed that the ballot has been stolen.
A mass voter education campaign must show unfamiliar voters how to fill out the ballot (no pencils, official envelopes only etc.) and how to fill out that envelope.
"Inactive" voters must not be denied ballots -- let the voter choose to be active. And, as proposed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, every voter should be mailed a ballot without having to return a postcard requesting the ballot, as many states require.
Unless America radically changes the way we send, receive and count mail-in ballots, the massive switch to postal voting, and the mountain of uncounted minority votes it will generate, could lead to Trump's re-election -- no matter the will of the voters.
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