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Voting Booth Briefing: Long Lines, Machine Issues and Mail-In Quandaries

Zoom Briefing: Joe Conason interviews reporter Steven Rosenfeld on the frontline problems facing the election.

When: Friday, June 19, 2020, at 12 p.m. EST

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Participants:

Steven Rosenfeld, Editor, Chief Correspondent and Senior Writing Fellow for Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Joe Conason, Editor-in-Chief of the National Memo, Editor-at-Large and Senior Fellow at the Type Media Center, and regular columnist for Creators Syndicate, distributed to publications nationally.

Introduction:

June’s primaries showcase how voters and election officials are—and are not—adapting to voting with more mail-in ballots and fewer in-person options. These elections and more than 30 statewide contests scheduled through mid-August will establish benchmarks and raise warning signs for voting this fall. Many problems surfaced in states like Georgia, where steps taken to continue voting in a pandemic ended up frustrating both mail-in and precinct voters, along with a string of other issues tied to deploying new voting machinery statewide for the first time.

The call will discuss:

The many problems in Georgia’s primary, and how they might manifest heading into November.
What trends have emerged from recent pandemic primaries that could present problems if fall election results are close—starting with mail-in ballots not being returned and others being disqualified and not counted.
The issues that experts expect some communities and demographic groups will have with absentee voting, and why.
How GOP officials and campaigns are responding to President Trump’s increasing criticism of voting by mail.

Voting Booth reports on how the means and rules of voting are changing. Apart from the partisan results of the general election, a widespread shift to absentee voting is likely to be one of the biggest political culture shifts across America in 2020.

Background reading:

The Red Flags That Foreshadowed Georgia’s June 9 Primary Election Meltdown Were Ignored

By Steven Rosenfeld, Salon.com

The signs kept coming that Georgia’s June 9 primary would not go well. On the last day of early voting, the Friday before the election, Jon Ossoff, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, waited for more than three hours to vote on Atlanta’s west side. It took Nikema Williams, the Georgia Democratic Party chair and a state senator from the city, more than five hours—on her wedding anniversary.

On the night before he voted, Ossoff told supporters that Fulton County in metro Atlanta had lost thousands of emailed requests for absentee ballots. That revelation suggested that voters who had never received their mail-in ballot would likely show up at what were fewer in-person polling places—reduced in number in response to an exodus of poll workers in the pandemic, and due to calls by officials to vote by mail. But Ossoff’s news hinted at deeper dysfunctions.

Read more at Salon.com.