We live in uncertain times, thanks to being
blindsided by a global pandemic of the COVID-19
coronavirus.
It’s already affected all of our lives in
astonishing ways – from social distancing
measures, to the cancelling of major sporting
events like the summer Olympics and the NBA
season, to it being almost impossible to get
food, hand sanitiser, and toilet paper in
supermarkets.
Nobody really knows how long this thing is
going to last, but some experts have posited
that it can last as long as 18 months or more.
With the United States 2020 Presidential Election
only seven months away, what might happen
if the pandemic is still active then?
You may have heard that this whole situation
will have blown over by mid-April, but realistically,
that’s unlikely to be how things are going
to shape up.
Cases are accelerating in the thousands every
single day, and even with social distancing
measures, people are still going to be infected
and are still going to die.
If social distancing measures are relaxed
too soon, cases will spike again, and some
estimate that the number of deaths could enter
the millions.
In other words, yes, we’re in this thing
for the long haul – and elections in November
likely will be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic has already delayed Democratic
Primary voting in Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland,
Puerto Rico, Ohio, and Kentucky.
There’s a logical reason for this – while
there is a small percentage of the country
who vote by domestic mail and international
absentee ballot, the grand majority of American
voters cast their vote in physical polling
stations.
Huge amounts of people gathering in tightly-confined
spaces for hours while waiting to vote presents
a huge risk for transmission on a mass scale.
Even worse, polling stations are often held
in retirement homes, and poll workers tend
to skew older, meaning huge numbers of people
are put at a significant health risk simply
by showing up to vote.
If the same thing happened on the day of the
general election in November, the results
would have the potential to be utterly catastrophic.
Where will it end?
The most obvious question that comes to mind
is: Will President Trump just call the whole
thing off, and hold the election again at
a later date when the COVID-19 pandemic is
finally over?
The simple, conventional answer is: No, not
legally at least.
The date of the federal election was set in
stone by a federal statute known as the Presidential
Election Day Act established all the way back
in 1845.
The act specifies, in what seems almost more
like a riddle than a law, “the electors
of President and Vice President shall be appointed
in each State on the Tuesday next after the
first Monday in the month of November of the
year in which they are to be appointed.”
The sitting President is incapable of shifting
this date, even with emergency powers and
an executive order.
Also, you may have noticed some interesting
terminology there: “the electors.”
That’s because the citizens of the United
States don’t technically vote to appoint
their president, they vote to appoint their
state elector, who then elects the president.
This system is known as the Electoral College.
In theory, the individual states could move
to change the process by which they appoint
their electors to make it a little more COVID-19-friendly,
but this would involve getting unanimous approval
from the state legislatures and governors
of all 50 states.
To push this motion through the gate before
November 3rd – this year’s election date
– would probably be as complicated as it
would be unpopular with the electorate at
large.
In other words, in the unlikely event that
the election was postponed, it probably wouldn’t
happen like that.
As anyone familiar with the United States
constitution will tell you, only a united
congress can postpone an election in the event
of a crisis.
They would need to essentially rewrite the
Presidential Election Day Act, but even this
would only delay the election by a few months,
and if the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging
in November, it would still be just as much
of a problem in December and January.
To delay the election any longer would involve
literally rewriting the constitution, which
would provide its own series of complications.
Also, delaying the election wouldn’t actually
increase President Trump’s term length.
According to the 20th Amendment to the US
Constitution, if not re-elected by the will
of the people, a president’s four-year term
ends at noon on January 20th following an
election year.
President Trump would be forced to step down,
and the leader of the House would temporarily
assume the role of Acting President until
the next election could take place.
Essentially, there’s almost no legal method
of delaying or postponing the election that
wouldn’t be a complete organisational nightmare.
There’s no real precedent for doing this,
either.
Elections have occurred during the civil war,
two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
and during World War II.
Even the Japanese-American citizens held in
Japanese internment camps during World War
II were allowed to vote by mail.
Pandemics of the past haven’t stopped elections,
either.
During the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 to
1919, which killed over 670,000 people in
the United States, a midterm election was
still held – albeit with a horrifically
low voter turnout.
And turnout is one of the decisive factors
here, because while many would go to the polls
on election day and get infected, many would
just stay home.
If the election was held as normal on November
3rd, the country would probably experience
historically low voter turnout, and some pundits
have even expressed fears that this could
be used to some people’s political advantage.
One example being that President Trump’s
use of the presidential text alert system
might spread dangerous misinformation about
the status of polling stations across the
country, but these fears aren’t necessarily
founded in evidence.
So, chances are, the election isn’t going
to be postponed or even delayed.
This leaves us with only two options: Changing
nothing and potentially risking a massively
exacerbated COVID-19 pandemic, or modifying
the election itself to potentially reduce
the risk of infection, as a number of constitutional
and election scholars have suggested.
You’re probably wondering how exactly you
can virus-proof an election, but thankfully,
we have some answers for you on that one.
The two suggestions most commonly put forward
by voting rights advocates is adopting complete
online voter registration and mass-adoption
of mail voting.
Online voter registration is described by
many as a “common sense” policy, seeing
as it’s an extremely simple and effective
way of helping eligible Americans register
to vote without posing any infection risks
to their fellow citizens.
By this same token, there are calls for all
states to enable same-day voter registration,
or even automatic voter registration, in order
to ensure the maximum number of eligible Americans
are able to register to vote.
These systems would be an excellent way to
potentially mitigate the low voter turnout
that COVID-19 would cause.
But of course, introducing mass mail voting
is the most in-demand policy for a COVID-19-friendly
presidential election.
Mail voting would not only massively reduce
face-to-face contact in the voting process,
it would also allow for many Americans who
don’t typically vote – such as poor or
marginalised groups whose care responsibilities
and work schedules hold them back from getting
to the polls on election day – to participate
in the democratic system.
This does, however, come with certain caveats.
The first is that it will fundamentally change
a lot of the actual mechanics of election
day.
A 90% mail vote election would not yield a
definitive result on the night of November
3rd, like we’re used to.
The results could take days or even weeks
to properly process into definitive outcomes.
That being said, this delay would be nothing
compared to the delay of actually postponing
the election as a whole, so it’s a relatively
small drawback.
A slightly bigger complication is the fact
that the United States is a multilingual nation,
and polling stations by law are obligated
to provide voting cards in the native language
of the voter.
In order to get around this in a mass mail
voting world, the government would need to
record people’s native languages during
registration in order to make sure they were
sending all voters the appropriate voting
cards.
This, in and of itself, would take quite some
time to organise, with the November 3rd deadline
looming.
Most states would need to also build entirely
new infrastructure to count all the paper
ballots, compared to the electronic voting
machines used in polling stations across the
country.
This would take extra state and federal funding
to help rebuild and reinforce the new infrastructure,
and whether the government would be willing
to allocate those funds is an open question.
“Why not just transition to voting online?”
is the question you’re probably asking right
now.
Well, that presents some serious problems,
too.
You probably remember hearing stories of hacking
and interference during the 2016 Presidential
Election, and that’s because even electronic
voting machines – which typically have high
standards of security and encryption – are
vulnerable to these attempts at infiltration.
Servers connecting to over 300 million American
personal computers would not only be notoriously
buggy, they’d also be extremely vulnerable
to outside hacking attempts.
You’ll often find that updating voting methods
is always a conflict between increasing voter
rights while also protecting the security
of the voting system.
Also, while widespread mail voting would help
reduce the potential COVID-19 risk, it would
be unwise to close all polling stations and
adopt 100% mail voting because of the select
groups of voters this would disenfranchise.
For example, Native American communities typically
have a PO box rather than a conventional home
address, meaning that mail voting wouldn’t
really work.
The same thing applies to America’s large
populations of homeless people, whether they’re
sleeping rough on the streets or living in
hotel rooms and vehicles.
While it’s vital to protect people from
COVID-19 infection in November, it isn’t
an excuse to deny vulnerable groups their
constitutional right to vote.
The polling stations kept open will just have
to engage in extra precautions as mandated
by the CDC.
Voting machines will likely be disinfected
thoroughly between uses, and lines for the
voting booths will be single-file with six
feet of distance between voters.
Measures would also need to be put in place
in order to protect the poll workers, such
as disinfectant, facial protection, and reserve
staff that will allow each employee to interact
with fewer people.
Much like the new infrastructure developed
for the influx of mail votes, developing polling
station precautions would take some overhead
that would need to be funded by the state
and federal government.
The real question now is whether the government
will actually plan and approve all this new
infrastructure prior to the November 3rd Presidential
Election?
The answer is: No, probably not.
The government hasn’t been known for efficiency
in the past, and considering that the federal
response to the COVID-19 pandemic so far has
done little to halt the spread, the most likely
scenario for November is that nothing will
be done and elections will carry on as normal.
This will most likely result in extremely
low voter turnout, and a large spike in infections
that would carry the pandemic into the next
year.
Hopefully, this won’t be the case, but as
of March, 2020, there has been no hard-and-fast
electoral planning to suggest otherwise.
One final question we might ask is how the
pandemic might actually affect the results
of the November Presidential Election.
According to most professional speculation
on the matter, the result is likely to depend
on two main factors: The death rates over
the next several months, and COVID-19’s
effect on the market.
If deaths are kept relatively low and the
market endures or recovers by November, President
Trump’s re-election is much more likely.
If the world slips into another global financial
recession as a result of COVID-19, this is
likely to jeopardise his chances of re-election.
The overall reality of the situation is that
we are living in unprecedented times.
Nobody knows what the next several months
will hold, and the world seems to undergo
rapid changes every single day.
Whether the pandemic will be around during
the 2020 Presidential Election is still, to
some degree, an open question, but planning
for the worst-case scenario is the best course
of action either way.
Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics
Show!
Still hungry for more information about how
the United States is dealing with our current
pandemic?
Why not check out “Why New Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Could Be Deadlier Pandemic Than SARS” and
“United States Plan For a Pandemic.”
In the meantime – stay indoors, wash your
hands, and avoid social contact.
