The Vote And Voting Problems, Pre-Election Day 2020

I arrived at one of Louisville’s early voting locations, a Marriott hotel, at 12:45 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon. By 12:55 p.m., I was totally done. I probably could have voted even faster, but I was trying to take in the whole scene, since it is my job to observe and write about the voting process. Counting poll workers and voters there were about 100 people in a ballroom with me — by far the biggest group I have been in since the start of the coronavirus outbreak. The mask-wearing was good (basically everyone had one on). The social distancing, not as good. Some of the poll workers were seated a bit too close to each other (not six feet apart). But overall, it seemed like a pretty safe environment.

All of this to say — everything is not wrong with election administration in America, at least based on my experience, in one city. In fact, Louisville at least right now seems like quite a positive story. The state of Kentucky has not previously had formal early in-person voting or mail-in voting. (I was able to vote absentee in-person in 2018 because I would be out of town on Election Day. I was at FiveThirtyEight headquarters in Manhattan.) But the Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, working with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and local officials, created both an expanded vote-by-mail system and three weeks of early voting this year amid the COVID-19 outbreak. In Louisville, there are four locations for early voting: one in the heavily-white eastern part of the city; another in the heavily-black western part of the city; one downtown, in an area where a lot of people work; and finally a location that is in the center of the city, at the fairgrounds. All four of those locations have absentee ballot drop boxes. You can also drop your absentee ballot off at the two boxes at the office of the county board of elections.

So far, all of that is working well. I visited all four early voting locations on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of early voting in Kentucky. At all four, people told me that the voting process had taken them less than ten minutes. At the county board of elections office, people parked and dropped off their ballots, taking about two minutes.

I am reluctant to draw many conclusions about the voting process in America based on my experience in one mid-sized city (about 760,000 people.) But it’s worth noting a few things. Adams, unlike Republicans in some states, has taken affirmative steps to make it easier to vote. That might just reflect his own views and ideology. That said, Louisville and Kentucky are not particularly electorally-competitive areas. President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are big favorites to win the state, while Rep. John Yarmuth, a Democrat, is almost certain to win in the Democratic-leaning Louisville area. So the election is not going to be decided by a few hundred or thousand votes, leading to both parties looking to gain an advantage in the voting process and putting Adams under a lot of pressure.