“To Save Election Day, Start by Getting Rid of Election Night?”

Eric Lach for the New Yorker:

In April, Wisconsin held elections even as covid-19 was spreading quickly through the state’s communities. Election officials there scrambled both to find safe ways to hold in-person voting and to keep up with a surge of absentee-ballot requests. The legal disputes, confusion, and unsafe conditions that resulted were a wake-up call for many. No one can say when the coronavirus crisis will fully pass, and election planners could not simply continue with business as usual this year. In response, lawmakers and activists began pushing for measures to safeguard the November elections from the coronavirus. Now a group of scholars calling themselves the Ad Hoc Committee for 2020 Election Fairness and Legitimacy have put out a helpful report listing fourteen recommendations. The group calls for absentee-ballot processes to be strengthened, and for lawmakers to recommit themselves to making voting accessible to all. But it also calls on the media to rethink the concept of Election Night. “It is especially important for the media to convey to the public the idea that, given an expected increase in absentee ballot voting in the November 2020 elections, delays in election reporting are to be expected, not evidence of fraud, and that the 2020 presidential election may be ‘too early to call’ until days after election day,” the report states.

The report is worth reading in its entirety, because it offers advice to all corners: lawmakers, the media, election administrators, outside groups. It’s a reminder that preserving elections at a time of increased partisanship and low public trust isn’t the responsibility of just one group or another, and won’t be fixed by just one solution picked from many. “The reasons for growing voter concern about the fairness and legitimacy of the U.S. election process are multifaceted, raising issues in law, media, politics and norms, and tech,” the group, which was convened by Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote. “This means that solutions to bolster American confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the elections must be multifaceted as well.”

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