The coronavirus outbreak could have a drastic effect on voting this November, depending on the voting laws in each state, and specifically which ones that have a system in place for mail-in voting, NBC News reports.
Wisconsin’s election last week highlights the difficulties that election organizers face during the coronavirus, with dozens of polling places closed, about 11,000 absentee ballot requests that went unfulfilled, and about 35,000 voters getting absentee ballots with incorrect instructions on how to return them.
In 2018, 25% of the 120 million ballots were cast by mail, which is an historic high according to the official Voting Survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, while just over 50% voted at the polls, where according to NBC more than half of workers were age 61 or older, placing them in one of the most at-risk demographics to the coronavirus.
Only five states have legalized mail-in ballots for all elections: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. Data from EAC shows that mail-in ballots accounted for a majority of votes there and in four other states: Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, and California. The data also shows that in 40 states, less than nine percent of ballots were cast by mail, and 70% of the vote was cast on election day.
"We've got more diversity in state election rules now than we had a few decades ago. Those differences may be even more consequential now, when a pandemic is a deterrent to face to face voting," Prof. Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Elections Research Center, told NBC. "There's still a lot of variability in what a voter needs to do to return an absentee ballot. And these little administrative details become really important (to turnout)."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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