Political polarization and intense partisanship in media and social media have laid the groundwork for distrust about the fairness of the 2020 elections, and the COVID-19 pandemic seems likely to escalate those problems.
Those are the conclusions of a new report released last week from a group of academics and voting-rights advocates, recommending a series of steps to shore up confidence and integrity in the nation’s election systems before the November presidential elections.
The report, “Fair Elections During a Crisis,” was produced by the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy and grew out of a February conference organized by some of the authors and that also included journalists and state elections officials. It is sponsored by the University of California-Irvine’s Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy with foundation support.
“Although a decade ago concerns about peaceful transitions of power were less common, Americans can no longer take for granted that election losers will concede a closely fought election after election authorities (or courts) have declared a winner,” the report states.
The conference upon which the report was based was scheduled long before the COVID-19 crisis hit and even months before the disease itself had been identified, says Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee who was part of the 25-member group that produced the document. At the time it took place, the sort of election-disrupting crises on people’s minds ran more in the direction of sudden natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes. But in drafting the report, the authors, led by Rick Hasen of the University of California-Irvine law school, took COVID-19 into account and tailored recommendations to reflect the pandemic’s impact on the country.