One common-sense measure would be to dramatically expand vote-by-mail options, allowing citizens to cast their ballots from a safe distance. (While every state allows voting by mail under some conditions, only five states conduct all of their statewide elections in this manner.) On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose state pioneered vote by mail in the 1990s, introduced legislation that would provide $500 million for states to begin making contingency plans for November’s election. If a state hard hit by coronavirus does need to transfer to a large-scale vote-by-mail operation, it would take months to buy optical scanners, put them in place and retrain poll workers. The transition requires a lot of extra preparation: The long delays counting the primary vote in California and Michigan, which have recently expanded early and absentee voting, have already shown that the system is often unprepared for tallying large numbers of pre-Election Day ballots.
Wyden’s plan is necessary and nonpartisan. But transitioning from voting in person to voting by mail would be a tectonic shift, presenting challenges that go beyond just technology or personnel, or even counting the vote. Any transition must also protect the foundational notion of one person, one vote, especially among historically disenfranchised communities. Too often, voting reforms have disregarded these citizens and their concerns.
Printed ballots can, in themselves, pose a challenge for equal access to the vote. While the Voting Rights Act requires that printed ballots be translated into multiple languages so that everyone can read election materials, the law is hardly perfect: Local governments need only provide translated ballots for groups that make up at least 5 percent of the population, or number at least 10,000 people. In many southern states, especially, that leaves many newly naturalized citizens, or those still learning English, vulnerable to disenfranchisement. Across Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, civil rights groups have pursued costly and time-consuming litigation trying to provide access to translators for individual voters in communities where the minority population might be significant, but under the required threshold.
Sometimes, localities that are required to provide translation services, to protect minority voting rights, fail to do so. The Department of Justice’s website lists dozens of examples of violations from the past 20 years; enforcement appears to have stopped after 2015. Meanwhile, rural communities in states including North Dakota, Colorado and Iowa have slow or unreliable postal delivery, which could create an unfair barrier to the ballot box.