Matt York/AP Photo
An Arizona voter delivers her mail-in ballot to a Phoenix polling station during the state’s presidential preference election on March 17, 2020.
On March 17—primary election day—Pinny Sheoran worked 15 straight hours at a community center polling place in Fountain Hills, Arizona, near Scottsdale. With people panicked about coronavirus exposure, Sheoran expected a lighter turnout and plenty of time to chat with her colleagues. Instead, the veteran poll worker was heartened by the mix of older and younger voters, streaming in throughout the day—some several hundred people, she estimated, many telling her the same thing: “I had no intention of staying home—this is an important election; we’re going to vote no matter what.”
Last-minute location changes and problems elsewhere in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and other locales prompted strong reactions on the Arizona Democratic Party’s Facebook page. Some commenters criticized the decision to hold the election, but one poster wrote, “Nope, get out and vote. Postponing any elections is one step closer to fascism.”
In Florida, election supervisors grappled with understandable though last-minute poll worker defections. So did officials in Illinois, where voting was chaotic, with long lines and closed polling locations, especially in Chicago.
Arizona, Florida, and Illinois have checkered voting-rights records in the best of times, from the hanging chads and butterfly ballots that still mar Florida’s reputation 20 years after the 2000 presidential election to the institutional barriers that people of color face in all three states. But although the coronavirus pandemic cast an apocalyptic pall over the St. Patrick’s Day primary turnout—it plummeted in Illinois—overall Democratic primary turnout exceeded expectations in Arizona and Florida.
With the question raging as to whether to go forward with the elections at all, Joe Biden’s victories were almost an afterthought. As the states next up on the primary calendar debate whether to postpone or proceed with elections, these three states delivered important clues that can guide election officials and voters alike. In broad strokes, in-person early voting and vote-by-mail boosted turnout, while on Election Day itself, many voters stayed away and other problems arose.
Voting by mail and early voting, in particular, proved to be electoral winners in Arizona and Florida, reducing the number of people who felt the need to show up in person on Election Day. They clearly mitigated the very real threat to exercising the franchise that the coronavirus pandemic has thrust on American voters in the midst of the most consequential election season in modern American history.
Before polls opened Tuesday, in Arizona, more than 480,000 Democratic mail-in ballots had been cast, compared to 317,000 in 2016. Overall, nearly 585,000 voters cast ballots in the party’s 2020 primary; in 2016, about 410,000 people voted. Sheoran, who is the Arizona League of Women Voters’ advocacy chair, was encouraged by the official response in her area, noting that county officials provided good information about social distancing, and provided gloves, cleaning supplies, and masks for people who wanted them at her location.
Arizona uses touchscreen technology: Once a voter’s identity has been verified, a ballot gets printed. Fountain Hills poll workers cleaned the screens with wipes, and passed sanitary products out to voters to clean their hands. Sheoran’s location did not have issues with lines, but she notes that some locations drew six-foot markers on the ground, the recommended “social distancing” spacing to indicate where lined-up voters should stand.
Overall, Florida’s combination of coronavirus fears, the absence of a competitive Republican presidential primary, and spring breaks for K-12 schools and colleges led to a sharply reduced turnout of 30 percent in 2020, down from 46.6 percent in 2016. But a robust early-voting period produced a slight uptick in 2020 Democratic voter turnout: 1.73 million, up from about 1.71 million in 2016.
Florida has long been a national poster child for poor election administration. But county election officials have endeavored to get their collective acts together with regular election administration training sessions. Frequent strong hurricanes also mean that election officials learn to manage fast-moving developments. After Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle in 2018, county officials to were able to extend early voting and were granted more flexibility in choosing polling sites. (Under normal circumstances, locations must meet a host of criteria for accessibility, number of available parking spaces, and the like.)
The coronavirus pandemic poses a threat to the most essential element of our democracy: holding elections in which large numbers of Americans of all stripes participate.
Page Gleason, who oversees NEO Philanthropy’s State Infrastructure Fund, a voting rights and civic-participation program, says that although Florida has never really addressed challenges like long lines that have plagued voting for decades, state election officials handled the March 17 primary “better than expected.” Election officials made the right call to take polling locations out of nursing homes and senior centers. They also encouraged people to cast ballots during the early-voting period—supported by a fierce radio, television, and social media blitz of public-education information.
In Pasco County, 175 poll workers decided not to volunteer, setting off a scramble by the county elections supervisor to recruit replacements—chiefly, among such public employees as teachers, firefighters, and police officers—to serve as poll workers. Palm Beach County also experienced no-shows. When poll workers did show up, some of them couldn’t get into polling places, or if they did, they didn’t have keys to the voting equipment.
Sick voters could take advantage of an emergency balloting process that allowed a person to pick up a ballot, deliver it to the voter, and return it to a county election office before the polls closed. But one self-quarantining Miami-Dade County voter who contacted an Election Protection Hotline was told that the period for mail-in ballots had passed; and officials were unwilling to offer any additional accommodations. Several civil rights groups have not been satisfied with the state’s efforts in the wake of the pandemic and have sued in U.S. District Court to extend voting until March 27.
Illinois’s decision to hold its primary led to some considerable chaos. Public schools were closed, but people were told to come out and vote on primary day. Dozens of locations were moved in the last few days before the vote (a process that usually takes months, not days) from senior centers and other locales serving older people. Voters were also turned away from locations that had been given no voting rolls, and others fled from ones that lacked cleaning supplies. “There’s no playbook for what happens during a pandemic,” says Brian Gladstein, an independent voting rights consultant and a former executive director of Common Cause Illinois.
Though final numbers are still being tabulated, the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights was inundated with an unusually high number of calls from all over the state—more than in the last several elections, according to the group’s senior counsel, Ami Gandhi. They also fielded calls from voters who were quarantined or homebound and not able to get to the polling places that had been substituted for those that had been in senior centers, nursing homes, or assisted living facilities.
Nearly 40 states offer some vote-by-mail and early voting processes, but vote-by-mail does not necessarily work for rural areas and American Indian communities that do not have standard street addresses.
Why did Illinois, which has a vote-by-mail program, fall short? Mainly, it’s because Illinois residents haven’t been made aware of their options. “It’s not our culture here in this state,” says Gladstein. Similarly, early voting is not heavily used since many people have an “emotional connection” to voting at a polling place on Election Day, he says.
AS THE DEATH toll mounts nationwide, states’ decisions to keep to or alter their scheduled voting calendar are subject to rapidly shifting calculations. The Ohio primary postponement demonstrated that public-health considerations can certainly overtake elections—and so far, Ohio has been joined by Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, Maryland, and Alabama (for its Senate runoff election) in pushing voting to May or June. Nearly 40 states offer some vote-by-mail and early voting processes; the ones that rely on these most are best positioned to hold primary contests in a crisis such as the current one. But vote-by-mail does not necessarily work for rural areas and American Indian communities that do not have standard street addresses, and it is a potent weapon that has been used to reduce voter participation among this Native American—and largely Democratic—constituency in Arizona.
The coronavirus pandemic certainly poses a threat to the most essential element of our democracy: holding elections in which large numbers of Americans of all stripes participate. Indeed, the fear and uncertainty gripping the country does not bode well for November’s general election. “It’s voter suppression by an act of God,” says Gladstein. “We are going to see a lack of voting happening and that may benefit this administration and [contribute to the] possibility of Trump being re-elected.”
The lamentable federal pandemic response by an unstable president whose “guidance” du jour is subject to mood swings means that states have to plan carefully to avoid fiascos like Ohio’s eleventh-hour postponement. Primary states with mail-in-ballot programs must ramp up traditionally anemic election funding and public education, and take special care to weed out suppressive measures.
At a minimum, holding elections going forward means that states should organize alternative polling locations; replace older poll workers with public-employee or student volunteers; and make sure that plenty of cleaning supplies are readily available well in advance of Election Day—whenever that happens. “All of this moving of elections makes me very nervous for November,” says Gleason. “The more stability we can provide, the better off we’re going to be.”
