The Vote And Voting Problems, Pre-Election Day 2020

In the past couple of weeks, a number of states like Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have seen huge upticks in voter registration numbers. Geoffrey, you wrote something on this recently. Tell me, what’s happening? Are more Republicans registering in a state like Florida?

Geoffrey: At first glance, the answer is yes. More Republicans are registering to vote in a state like Florida. Since the deadline to register for Florida’s March presidential primary, Republicans have registered about 147,000 more voters than Democrats have, and the share of Republican registrants has ticked up.

However, this is complicated by the fact that: 1) more Democrats registered in the months before the presidential primary because they were more engaged by the competitive Democratic nomination contest than Republicans were; and 2) many voters who register as independent tend to be younger, and we know that those voters are more likely to vote Democratic, even if they don’t identify openly that way.

Moreover, party identification can be a lagging indicator of who a person supports — meaning someone may have previously supported the party they’re switching their party registration to now.

So … the long answer is that we can’t actually know whether more Republican voters registered than Democratic ones!

Kaleigh: I’ve also seen a lot of reporting about Republicans “closing the gap” in states like Pennsylvania, but what they’ve really done is narrowed the gap. There are still currently 700,853 more Democrats than Republicans registered in Pennsylvania.

Nathaniel: Yeah, I wouldn’t put much stock in those registration numbers if you’re trying to understand how the election might swing. The polls are just a much more direct way to answer that question — they ask directly who a person supports instead of depending on an unreliable proxy for it like registration.

And the polls are designed to pick up all voters — new and old!

Geoffrey: That’s right, Nathaniel. You might even say that voter registration numbers are a Rorschach test of sorts — you can sort of make what you want of them, especially with the increasing number of voters who register as independent, which makes it even harder to draw big conclusions from these numbers.

Kaleigh: Earlier this year, Nathaniel and I reported on how the pandemic had taken a huge toll on new voter registrations. At the beginning of the year, we were on track to see a record number of new voters registering, but with lockdowns (and, in particular, the closure of DMVs), those new registration numbers plummeted:

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who was one of our sources, recently told NPR they’re seeing a bit of a rebound but “[I]t’s not making up for all of the activity that we’ve lost due to the pandemic.”

Nathaniel: Yeah, and new registrations are really a drop in the bucket compared to existing registrations. So even if a majority of new registrants are voting for Trump, if existing registrants strongly support Biden, it wouldn’t matter.

Sarah: OK, between early voting data and voter registration numbers … how should I be factoring this into how I think about the election?

Is it an indication that voter turnout/enthusiasm might be high? Or should I disregard this?

Geoffrey: Look to the polls. First, they show that Biden is generally doing better than Trump among people who identify as independent. So, even if the GOP has added more voters, a Biden edge among independents could override that.

Second, for turnout I’d look to polls about enthusiasm and interest. For instance, Gallup found in late September that 71 percent of registered voters said they were more enthusiastic about voting in 2020 than in past elections — the highest percentage since Gallup started asking this question in 1996.

On Tuesday night, a federal appeals court voted 12-3 to deny a request from North Carolina Republicans, who wanted the court to impose an emergency stay on a state voting rule allowing state officials to count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received up to nine days later. However, this may not be the last we’ve heard of this case. The three dissenting judges — none of whom, notably, were Trump’s recent appointees to this appellate court — urged the GOP officials who had asked for the stay to take the case to the Supreme Court “immediately.”

Jason from Fort Lauderdale, Florida: How many states are allowed to open and prepare ballots before Election Day? Have there been any recent changes related to this in any swing states?

There are only eight states that require ballot processing to begin on Election Day this year. Of those, two are swing states: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The remaining states, plus Washington, D.C., allow processing to begin earlier, ranging from the day a ballot is received to Nov. 2.

Nine of these 42 states changed their guidelines for 2020 to allow for more time to process ballots, including potential swing states like Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire. I’d also add Arizona, which passed a law in 2019 allowing counties to start counting early ballots up to two weeks ahead of Election Day (previously, counties could start only one week before).

Here’s where the caveats come in: First, “processing” a ballot means different things in different states. In some jurisdictions, officials can only check voter signatures; in others, they’re allowed to check signatures, open ballots and prepare them for tabulation. Second, some states have limitations on the types of ballots that can be processed early. In Michigan, for example, only cities with at least 25,000 residents can start pre-processing ballots on Nov. 2 (and according to the Detroit Free Press, not all of the qualifying cities intend to do so). So while we can expect many of these states to make some headway before Election Day, it’s hard to know how much of the pre-Election Day vote will be counted on Nov. 3.