Election rights activists on Thursday warned Congress that the government can’t ensure safe and free elections in November. The types of problems that plagued the recent primary in Georgia will spread nationwide if Congress does not spend more on America’s election infrastructure, they said.
The testimony before the Democrat-run House panel was designed to ramp up pressure for an overhaul of election laws, including the party’s push for nationwide mail-in voting in federal elections.
Still, there is virtually no chance for a rewrite of election rules in an election year, which leaves the issue in the hands of state governments.
The Georgia primary this week was one of the most chaotic in U.S. history, according to Kristen Clarke, president of National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The long lines, malfunctioning equipment, and late-opening polling locations her group heard about in Georgia could appear elsewhere on Election Day later this year if Congress doesn’t act now, she told a House panel.
“Many states and local counties are simply unprepared to safely handle people voting in-person and several states have failed to provide requested mail-in ballots in time for them to be cast,” Ms. Clarke said. “Georgia is the poster child for this dysfunction and disenfranchisement of African American voters, as it has been repeatedly.”
Rep. Marcia Fudge, Ohio Democrat, said she thinks Congress should immediately spend substantially more to address such concerns. She blamed voters’ uncertainty on President Trump, who’s insisted that increased availability of vote-by-mail could lead to fraud.
“During all of this confusion and uncertainty, the president is waging an insidious campaign to sow distrust by spreading false claims that vote-by-mail is ripe for fraud and threatening states that are expanding access to safe voting options,” Ms. Fudge said.
Republicans have resisted attempts to tinker with the election systems.
Louisiana Secretary of State R. Kyle Ardoin told the committee that he intends to fight any federal mandate on how his state runs elections, even if it means forgoing federal funds.
“Receiving one-time funds to run elections during an unprecedented crisis at the expense of radically changing our elections system is a tradeoff we are not willing to make,” he said. “We will gladly accept federal dollars with no strings or political motivations attached, and we would prefer not to have to come up with state matching dollars in a time of such economic turmoil.”
Mr. Ardoin and his counterpart in Alabama, John H. Merrill, said their states are not equipped to handle vote-by-mail-only elections and do not have the infrastructure necessary to make such a system possible. All-mail elections do not mean only-mail elections, but the coronavirus outbreak’s potential to drive up vote-by-mail ballots means states are rethinking their election systems.
Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, said states are about to see a surge in online voter registration that they are not prepared to handle. He urged lawmakers to help on that front, too.
“Already this year, we’ve seen online systems overwhelmed in Georgia, Florida, and Wisconsin too often leading [to the] failure of those systems and this problem is only going to get worse as we approach registration deadlines around the country,” he said. “We need to adjust for that now.”
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