With less than 50 days until the upcoming election, drastic shifts in voting procedure due to the pandemic have finally begun to come into focus.
Sometime during the weeks leading up to the election, Brandon Ranallo-Benavidez, an assistant professor of political science, will visit his Charlotte, North Carolina polling center and cast his ballot.
With controversy swirling around the validity of mail-in-voting and daily headlines on the subject circulating national media, Ranallo-Benavidez will choose to skip the crowds, vote early and watch as the voting machine swallows his ballot.
“I do personally just want to physically be there and watch my ballot go into the machine,” he said. “I’m hoping that figuring out a day to go on like a Saturday or Sunday morning and get it done before the election can give me both the peace of mind in knowing I have voted and it is counted and I didn’t have to put myself in danger of catching the coronavirus.”
It is hard to say whether the 80 million other Americans who choose to mail in their ballot will have the same level of confidence their votes will be counted. The United States Postal Service has experienced extreme delays and faced nearly $13 billion in financial losses due to a decline in overall mail volume due to the pandemic.
In the lead-up to an incredibly high-stakes presidential election this November, concerns have been raised regarding the postal service’s ability to handle an exponential increase in absentee early voting.
In response, many states began working towards an expansion of mail-in voting services. On April 8 U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted out his
concerns regarding these efforts.
“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. … Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever
reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
This notion that voting by mail disproportionately benefits Democrats over Republicans is largely unsubstantiated, and a large number of Republican figures vote absentee or by mail, including President Trump himself just last year. The largely conservative state of Utah has voted entirely by mail for years and continues to elect conservative and Republican candidates year after year.
Just days later, outgoing Postmaster General Megan Brennan told a house panel that the postal service would likely run out of money by the end of the year without intervention from congress and the president in the form of a $25 billion bailout in emergency funds and another $25 billion to
modernize the service.
In late May it was announced that Louis DeJoy, a businessman and Republican fund-raiser that donated $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund, would be the new Postmaster General. Under DeJoy’s new leadership this summer, the Postal Service began to undergo several cost-cutting measures and policy changes.
The service began cutting hours and overtime to postal workers and encouraged staff to leave unsorted mail at the end of the day, furthering delays, and even removed approximately 671 high-capacity letter sorters.
Most notably, images began to circulate in national media of blue drop-off boxes being removed ahead of the election.
“Trump appointed a Trump donor as the postmaster general and clearly the postmaster general has been implementing a bunch of policies to slow down the post office and to lessen their work speed,”
Zander Orlin, a junior theater tech and design major, said.
“Plenty of people and I have experienced that shipping has been very slow.”
In letters sent to 46 state governments, the Postal Service advised that, “there is significant risk that the voter will not have sufficient time to complete and mail the completed ballot… in time for it to arrive by the state’s return deadline.”
This followed a recent internal audit that claimed one million ballots were sent late to voters during the 2020 primary, according to The New York Times.
Just days before DeJoy was set to testify before a senate panel,“Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced… Analysts say the
structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive
and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of
institutional postal knowledge,” according to Salon.com, DeJoy has since promised to pause all internal changes to the Postal Service leading up the
election – without confirming whether efforts would be made to reverse the changes already in effect.
“While we have had a temporary service decline, which should not have happened, we are fixing this,” DeJoy said.
Due to complications with the postal service, Orlin plans to vote in person on Nov. 3.
“It’s my first time voting and secondly I think it’s very important for as many people to vote as possible right now, especially if you’re liberal-leaning,” adding that although he is comfortable with this approach to voting for himself, “I wouldn’t necessarily suggest to go and do that because
COVID is still a thing and there are immunocompromised people.”
Ranallo-Benavidez acknowledged the existence of some dissatisfaction among young people about the choice of presidential candidates this election.
“Not every election is about the presidency,” Ranallo-Benavidez said, adding the fact that incredibly important policy change occurs on the state and local level too.
“If you want to reform policing that’s something that’s going to be
handled by your local police chief, your mayor and your city council–the people you’ve probably heard the least about in this election. So getting informed and going to vote for those issues matters too.”
No matter what your reason for voting this November, it is important to register to vote, craft a feasible voting plan, and get informed on the issues that matter most to you, because, “everything is on that one ballot,” Ranallo-
Benavidez said.
Graphic by Lizzy Talbert
