(Opinion.) Voters in Connecticut deserve a competent state elections system and contemporary voting options available elsewhere, like early voting and absentee ballot tracking.
This summer, Connecticut quietly made history when it became the first state to ever hold a modern presidential primary in the month of August. The record-setting late date was the result of not one, but two, rescheduled nominating contests.
Since March, similarly unceremonious but historically unique moments have taken place across the United States. As the coronavirus pandemic roiled the country, rates of Covid-19 skyrocketed in the spring, surpassing 100,000 by Memorial Day.
The peculiarities of these pandemic-era primaries were decidedly not top of mind for many Americans. And in the context of presidential nominations, the outcome (for both Democrats and Republicans) was a foregone conclusion by time the pandemic’s cataclysmic impact registered nationwide. But questions abound for the general election, where no such corollary flexibility or certainty is possible — in timing or results. The pandemic-riddled primaries of 2020, including Connecticut’s, do not bode well for the health of the race in November.
As spring turned to summer, the economy, as well as traditional election cycle engines, shuttered. Over a dozen primaries were postponed. Both national conventions were moved and converted to largely virtual events. Election season rallies became the exception, not the rule. Across the country, officials and citizens alike looked backwards for answers. Voting has happened in the United States, after all, amidst world wars, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks.
The most pertinent parallel is the midterm election of 1918, which took place during a wartime flu pandemic. The strain of Spanish flu that spread around the world became one of the deadliest bouts of influenza ever recorded. In the United States alone, some 675,000 people died. For the election itself, local officials called the shots on polling, voting, and safety, in what public health scholar Krista Watkins describes as a “wheeler-dealer hustle.”
That pandemic, like the coronavirus, certainly had tangible political impacts. Voter turnout was extremely low. But did politics have a reciprocal effect? In many parts of the country, quarantines were lifted for the first time as a week of campaigning commenced, followed by voting. Despite precautions similar to the norms of 2020 (masking, spacing, cleaning), spikes in deaths followed, and were particularly pronounced (or perhaps just more traceable) in small, rural communities.
In 2020, primaries characteristic of established practices, endemic patterns, and regional personalities commenced, revised and retrofitted in response to the coronavirus, across the United States. In Georgia’s primary, scores of closed polling places caused lines that spanned entire precincts. The echoes of the state’s long history of voter suppression were hard to miss. New York, then the country’s epicenter of the coronavirus, hurriedly tried (and failed) to do away with the necessity of a primary altogether, given its status as a contest in name only. Wisconsin’s storied partisan divisions made the way their primary proceeded — with court intervention — look inevitable. The state’s contest took place in-person, as scheduled, after the Democratic governor’s attempt to switch to voting by mail was rejected.
The tradition of voting by mail in the United States precedes the 20th century, beginning with soldiers on the battlefields of the Civil War. The notion that voting by mail begets fraud, while increasingly referenced as the 2020 presidential election proceeds, is essentially a fraudulent claim in and of itself. An infinitesimal level of voter fraud, especially in vote by mail states, was found even when examined by the decidedly conservative Heritage Foundation.
Nevertheless, the matter of mail-in ballots in 2020 has had to overcome twin hurdles: logistics and partisanship. By the time Connecticut’s belated in-person primary took place on Aug. 11, 2020, the state had determined that Covid-19 was an acceptable “excuse” to vote by mail, e.g., reason enough for registered and active voters to request and then return a valid absentee ballot. This provision was introduced as a strictly temporary executive order by Gov. Ned Lamont. The Connecticut General Assembly subsequently extended the validity of this “excuse” to the general election over the summer. Federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding was used to automate the provision of some 1.2 million absentee ballot applications to registered voters. The applications included free, prepaid return postage, also courtesy of the CARES Act. No such action was taken at the federal level, and no additional national election security measures have passed since.
On Connecticut’s actual primary day, not much happened. Between the pandemic, postal service slowdowns, power outages in the wake of a severe tropical storm, and bickering among political party representatives, state officials as well as local election personnel, turnout, both in person and by absentee ballot, was low. According to the United States Elections Project, it in fact dipped from 21% in the 2016 primary to just 12.9%. One week before the primary, over 20,000 voters of the 300,000 who returned a request for an absentee ballot, or 15% of total requestees, had not received one. In the days after the primary, Connecticut’s trial run seemed less like a stress test for the general election and more like a reinforcement of the regional mood. No upsets occurred. Few reports on the low turnout or the absentee ballot kerfuffle exist.
What’s more, a decided lack of transparency, as well as voter confidence, persist as the general election approaches. Connecticut prohibits early voting. The state has no centralized system for “ballot curing.” By law, Connecticut’s official state website explains that absentee ballots will not be opened, let alone checked, before election day. Thus voters have no opportunity to correct honest mistakes.
At the same time, ballots must arrive by election day. Here in East Rock, despite returning my absentee ballot request the same day it arrived (well over a month ago), my own mailbox remains ominously ballot free. Other New Haveners received the ballots of other voters in the mail by mistake. And crucially, even after the election, no mechanism exists for voters to ever learn whether their absentee ballot was counted, according to an email from Connecticut’s Director of Elections Theodore Bromley. (You can track your physical absentee ballot application, including if your town clerk got it back, but you cannot confirm whether it was accepted or thrown out after that.)
As in 1918, this patchwork of state by state provisions and policies around casting a vote (by mail or otherwise) amidst a pandemic remain partisan, politically controversial, and varied beyond measure. In the northeast alone — where states share borders, commuters, and coordinated pandemic protocols — no two states have identical, or even meaningfully similar, voting practices.
One example from the tristate area this year, e.g., Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, is the fine print around absentee ballots. In Connecticut, a request is necessary to receive a ballot, but applications to make that request are automatically mailed, as previously described. In New Jersey, no request is necessary, as ballots themselves are automatically mailed. In New York, anyone can initiate a request, but nothing is automatic.
Hundreds if not thousands of differences, from who and under what circumstances someone is eligible to vote by absentee ballot, how and when to register to vote, deadlines for actually voting, signatures, witnesses, what the ballot itself requires you to do, acceptable pen colors, and more, abound across the country. As the election experts Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart III put it, even learned professors of political science — let alone the average American — are struggling to “navigate the relevant websites to register and request a…ballot.”
These protocols are also legally in flux, just forty days out from the general election. 2020’s own set of “wheeler-dealer” primaries appear reflective of the primacy of state’s rights in the Trump era — seemingly more indicative of individualized electoral character than any enduring reforms.
In Connecticut, contingencies for August are now on repeat for November, with no time for interim adjustments or much assessment of results. Voters who hoped for options long adopted elsewhere like early voting (Connecticut is one of just seven states without it), the tracking of absentee ballot votes (again, Connecticut is in a small minority that don’t even attempt to offer such a mechanism), or even a coordinated, let alone bipartisan, statewide response, may feel disappointed, but not surprised. After all, as the legal journalist Emily Bazelon points out about her “old-fashioned” home state of Connecticut, only three percent of the population voted by mail in 2016. Why should voters in the so-called constitution state have expected any kind of nimble or surefooted rising to the occasion of innovation, especially on behalf of its citizens, as opposed to its protocols?
Because presidential elections in the United States are decided by party-affiliated electors, as opposed to directly by the people, few national politicians care about Connecticut. The state has only seven electoral college votes and is decisively majority Democrat. However, as another legal journalist, Jesse Wegman, puts it, the electoral college system obscures the makeup of most states, which are habitually referred to as “blue” or “red” e.g., faithfully Democrat or Republican affiliated. In reality, most states are “purple.”
While Connecticut may be safe from “flipping” its statewide popular vote from blue to red in the context of the presidential election, many states do regularly go from one party to the other, from one election to the next. What’s more, residents have more than one decision — more than one race — that matters on Nov. 3. Regardless of electoral college math, voters in Connecticut deserve a modicum of competence from the state’s elections system, and reliable, contemporary choices in the simple act of making sure our votes count.
Contributed Photo
Maya Polan (pictured) is a born and raised resident of New Haven.