Voting With COVID-19

News of COVID-19, being one of the most recent incidents, has concealed one of the major aspects of 2020 - it is an election year!

Come fall, we usually expect long lines coming out of polling places for the presidential election. Schools block off hallways to set up voting booths and traffic seems heavier than ever on that one autumn night. People are eager to make their vote count! However, with the dark cloud, that is the coronavirus, hovering over us, we are unsure if people are willing to risk their safety to put their vote in. Consequently, we have seen a rise in interest for mail-in ballots to serve as an alternative to physically going to a polling place.

A polling station, where flyers are handed from person to person, screens are touched, and pens are shared, is a clear welcome mat for the COVID-19 virus. To prevent this political event from being an issue, many states have taken action to push back their state elections. By delaying elections, they hope that fewer people would be at risk, as they anticipate the number of affected individuals to start decreasing. Despite this effort, the mere act of going to a physical polling place would still put all of the voters at risk. Even just one carrier could initiate a ripple of new cases. Therefore, states have also decreed that mail-in and absentee ballots will be accepted. For many years now, we have seen a huge decrease in the number of voters going out to polling places. However, with the access to mail-in ballots, individuals are not required to drive to their designated polling place after a long, hard day of work.

Aside from understanding the convenience that they provide to the voters, mail-in ballots do take longer to process because its advance processing differs. First, the signature on the ballot is checked to make sure that the person who voted is indeed a registered voter. Then, the ballots are sorted out based on the voter’s districts and put away until ten business days before election day. When this day arrives, the ballots are placed into the folder for their district to be scanned with the other votes from there. These ballots normally take about two weeks to process completely. This is why news channels such as CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News are able to predict who is leading in the polls so early in the day. The first few votes on those projections come from mail-in ballots. However, these ballots must be cross-checked again with votes at polling stations to ensure that the same voter does not send in a mail-in ballot, and also vote in person. No one is allowed to vote twice. After election night, it takes another week or so to get all the votes tallied and checked again, but by then it is pretty clear which candidate won the election. This operation seems long, but it is a viable option for this year’s election. Mail-in ballots allow individuals to take the proper cautions they believe are necessary, in addition to fulfilling their duty as a citizen.

Why Voting Matters

As a citizen, it is important to keep in mind that every vote counts! It is crucial for our democracy. Despite what some may believe, every single vote is put into the system and is counted as one whole vote. Think of it as voting for your class representative in grade school. These school events may seem frivolous as your vote holds more value with fewer people calling themselves the voters, but they provide a better perspective of why voting matters even at a much smaller scale. These Presidential election polls are being held to determine the leader of the country for the next four years, and your vote is a contributing factor to this major decision. The past few months, and even upcoming months, are the times of the year when caucuses and primaries are the main features of news channels. However, with the recent pandemic, flipping through the news, many may have even forgotten that it is an election year!

Political parties have already lined up to say that mail-in ballots will give the other party an unfair advantage. On the contrary, ongoing studies show that mail-in ballots do not, in fact, give either party an advantage. These claims are only justifications as to why one party won over the other. Moreover, the option of sending in election ballots has seemed to increase the turnout of voters in both parties, not just one (Thompson et. al, 2020). It is important to remember that just the ability to be able to vote from the comfort of home will not create a huge change in habits of voting at all. Hundreds of Americans do not vote either because they are unable to get to the polling booth in time, they do not want to, or they are not registered. Either way, voting is a right that all Americans have, and therefore no one is and no one should be forced to vote. Clearly, even with these clauses, mail-in ballots have almost no affiliation with which party has an “advantage” over the other. They are only another means to an end— an end that will define what path our nation will take for the next four years.

Sources

COVID-19 and Elections. (n.d.-a). NCSL. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/state-action-on-covid-19-and-elections.aspx

COVID-19 and Elections. (n.d.-b). NCSL. Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/state-action-on-covid-19-and-elections.aspx

Fessler, P. (2020, April 10). NPR Choice page. NPR. https://choice.npr.org/index.html?origin=https://www.npr.org/2020/04/10/831059882/coronavirus-may-reshape-who-votes-and-how-in-the-2020-election

Thompson, D. M., Wu, J., Yoder, J., & Hall, A. B. (2020, April). The Neutral Partisan Effects of Vote-by-Mail: Evidence from County-Level Roll-Outs | SIEPR. Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/neutral-partisan-effects-vote-mail-evidence-county-level-roll-outs

Wines, M. (2020, June 19). Covid-19 Changed How We Vote. It Could Also Change Who Votes. Https://Www.Nytimes.Com/#publisher. https://www.nytimes.com