Vote-By-Mail

"This is a tremendous victory for mail-in voters in Pennsylvania," Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. "We are relieved that minor clerical errors will no longer prevent Pennsylvanians from having their votes counted. We look forward to seeing the impact that this ruling will have on future elections, particularly for communities of color and elderly Pennsylvanians."

Voting-rights advocates said Tuesday that they’ve heard from students, including “dozens” at Ohio State University, who have said they never got the mail ballot they requested for today’s election. Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, said they’ve encountered these students as they’ve showed up at polling places this morning on OSU’s campus to try to vote. Lewis said that other than in college towns, state data doesn’t show an unusually high number of outstanding absentee ballots overall. Voting-rights advocates weren’t certain about the reason for the ballot problems for students, but thought it could have something to do with university mail systems that serve as a “middle man” between students and the post office.

New Mexico doesn’t require any reason for someone to request an absentee ballot. There are only really benefits to that, said Mason Graham, policy director for Common Cause, a nonprofit that works to uphold voter rights. He said it started up with the COVID-19 pandemic. He said absentee ballots allow for more convenience in voting and can help people do more research on candidates. Despite baseless misinformation around mail-in voting, it’s just as secure as in-person voting. Graham said there are extensive integrity and security measures with absentee ballots. For example, voters receive two envelopes with absentee ballots, he said. One is the actual ballot and another is a security envelope inside the ballot, Graham said, and the officials counting the votes verify that the security envelope is closed. Fraudulent ballots also don’t come through because election officials check names, social security numbers and addresses, Graham said. “It’s the exact same level of security that you would get if you were to go to your own voting location,” he said. There is 24-hour monitoring on drop boxes. “Any kind of tampering of ballot drop boxes would immediately be flagged, and election officials will be notified. So there isn’t any issue when it comes to the integrity of the ballot drop boxes,” Graham said.

“It’s not the ballot boxes that are the problem,” said Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause in Connecticut. “In this particular case, it seems like the problem is the leadership of campaigns that permit that kind of activity, that has staff, that has campaign staff who ... would put ballots in big envelopes and stuff them into the ballot box.”

“How do they get anything done? Are the important decisions going to be deadlocked? The consequences of that, as we are learning, could be devastating,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina. Early voting polling sites and schedules must be approved by the unanimous support of a county election board under current law, Phillips said. If a member of the county board objects, the state board must decide. If it cannot, he said, current law says the only early voting site would be the county board of elections office. Such a decision could have a devastating impact on turnout in large counties that might normally have more than a dozen early voting locations, he said, and leave voters in more rural, less populous counties forced to travel.

“There’s a clear contrast here between the two visions for what each party views for going forward with American democracy,” said Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit. “One party wants to make it harder for Americans to vote and wants there to be more big money in politics, and the other party wants to make sure that all eligible Americans can vote and wants to make sure big money does not dominate politics.”