The Vote And Voting Problems, Pre-Election Day 2020

The Washington Post is reporting that at least 33 million Americans have already voted nationally with two weeks to go until Election Day. This amounts to 70 percent of the total number of early votes cast in 2016. Of course, the surge in early voting isn’t a surprise, considering the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged voters to avoid lines on Election Day and states have expanded early voting availability. Nonetheless, these are historic figures. But as the Post’s analysis cautions, the early vote alone can’t tell us whether there’ll be record-setting overall turnout once all the votes are counted.

Last night, the U.S. Supreme Court finally weighed in on a dispute that’s been at their doorstep for quite some time, and declined a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to halt a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that allowed some mail-in ballots to be counted up to three days after Election Day. The outcome was the result of a 4-4 deadlock on the court with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the three liberal justices, since Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh all noted in the order that they would have granted the stay.

On an immediate level, this means that the extended deadline stands, and more delays in reporting election results in Pennsylvania are likely. But the divided nature of the order also emphasizes just how important the impending confirmation of Judge Barrett could be for future voting rights rulings. It’s very unusual for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule a state Supreme Court when interpreting its own state constitution (which was the issue in the Pennsylvania case), and the justices in this case didn’t offer any reasoning for their votes. But if Barrett is confirmed, she could be the decisive vote in future disputes along these lines.

On Friday, I wrote about ongoing litigation in North Carolina and what that meant for absentee ballots that had mistakes (such as missing signatures). The state had paused processing these ballots until they knew how to fix them, which meant that every day that passed was one less day voters had to potentially correct their ballot.

Luckily for them, though, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced on Monday that the state would start processing rejected ballots so that people can address those mistakes ASAP.