Vote-By-Mail

“What you can see is our electorate is more engaged than it has been in a primary for decades,” said Heather Ferguson, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico. “They’ve had some time for life to slow down. ... They were watching more news, getting more input about this election. They got fired up and wanted to vote.” At the same time, Ferguson said Common Cause is taking stock of whether participation was hindered by the state’s timetable for initiating absentee ballot applications and lengthy delivery times in remote regions.

“I am trying to see today as an opportunity to show the cracks in the system that we can fix before November,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for voting rights group Common Cause. Albert said there is concern that in the November election, people who request absentee ballots will not receive them, and there will be fewer polling places as counties consolidate them in response to the pandemic. “There needs to be a rational level of consolidation that ensures that communities who especially have not used vote by mail in the past or cannot use vote by mail — such as disabled communities or people without addresses, homeless, transient — that there are enough polling locations to serve those people,” Albert said.

“The big story out of Pennsylvania is really voter confusion,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim director of government watchdog Common Cause Pennsylvania. ... In Indiana, voting rights groups said they heard from many people who reported they never received the absentee mail ballots they had requested. “That certainly contributed to long lines in Marion County,” said Julia Vaughn, policy director for Common Cause Indiana. Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, consolidated its polling places and had only 22 open on Tuesday.

This presidential election year, Americans need solutions so they don't have to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote. On Tuesday morning polls will open for primaries in eight states and Washington, D.C., and election officials are making final preparations to keep voters and election workers safe. Contests in four of those states were postponed during the coronavirus pandemic, which is why the day is being labeled as another Super Tuesday. And so this is an important moment for a closer look at states that already vote by mail. My home state of Oregon is ranked first: 99 percent of us voted from home in the 2018 midterm election, more than any other state.

“We know that there are going to be issues on June 2nd,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim executive director of Common Cause PA, citing instances in which county offices have sent out duplicate mail-in ballots, or even the wrong political party’s primary ballot; the massive consolidation of polling places in places like Philadelphia; and the use of new machines in many places. “The way that we’re looking at this is really that we we will have a lot of clarity after June 2nd about what needs to be fixed for November," Almeida said. "And we’re hoping we can come up with some really clear, practical solutions... to make sure that no voter is disenfranchised in November.”

Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said the state was doing its best to accommodate Baltimore in an unprecedented situation. “It’s just unfortunate that it’s always these areas that are hit the most,” she said.