POLITICO NIGHTLY: Election Day won’t be in November

BY RENUKA RAYASAM

Presented by

With help from Myah Ward

IT WILL BE EARLIER — The pandemic wiped out campaign season. But it has also accelerated the transformation of Election Day into election season.

Officials in almost every state in the country are working on pandemic-proofing the election: They’re changing the rules around voting by mail, early voting and Election Day procedures. More people than ever are going to be voting weeks before Election Day and voting in stadiums rather than senior centers.

Voting by mail isn’t new: President Donald Trump today floated the idea of delaying the November election, arguing that mail voting leads to widespread voter fraud.

But even before the pandemic 38 states — both red and blue — and the District of Columbia allowed any resident to vote by mail or absentee without an excuse. This year Virginia joined them, allowing residents to mail their ballots without an excuse, and New York is considering similar legislation. Think of it as the absentee voting equivalent of no-fault divorce.

And this year most state election officials are making the vote by mail process even easier, either by making mail ballots more accessible or less onerous to verify.

California and Vermont joined Hawaii, Utah, Washington, Oregon and Colorado in sending a mail ballot to all registered voters, eliminating the need to ask for one, according to Wendy Underhill, director of the elections and redistricting program at the National Conference of State Legislatures. And nine of the 11 states that do require an excuse to vote by mail now allow a Covid diagnosis as a reason to receive a mail ballot in their state primaries or will do so in their general election.

North Carolina is now requiring one witness, not two, to verify the ballot. Voters in the state can start casting their absentee ballots 60 days before Nov. 3.

“It’s a great big change,” said Underhill. “Ordinarily you might take two or three years to make these changes. People are doing it at warp speed to the best of their ability.”

At least one state is allowing extra time for in-person voting: Texas is one of the handful of states that hasn’t expanded access to mail voting, but the state extended its early voting period for a week. Voters can show up to polling locations to cast their ballot in person starting on Oct. 13 to avoid Election Day crowds.

Election Day will look different: Traditional polling places like senior centers, churches and schools are opting out of Election Day, said Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center's Voting Rights and Elections Program. She said that state officials are in conversations with local business owners to repurpose stadiums for Election Day voting. Kentucky used a convention center as a polling location in its primary.

Don’t expect an instant result: It takes weeks to prepare mail ballots: to get the right paper stock, print them and mail them out. Some ballots may reach voters too late.

Even with the expected rise in mail voting, election expert Richard Hasan said he expects some long lines on Election Day. Pandemic voting procedures like wiping down machines could slow down the process — in New Hampshire hand sanitizer clogged voting machines during the March primary. Workers may not show up. In Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers called out the National Guard to staff the polls during the state’s presidential primary.

And far more people are expected to vote in this year’s presidential election.

Plus because Trump has cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail voting, many of his supporters may choose to show up to the polls, rather than mail their vote.

“At the very least,” said Hasan, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, “it’s going to be an Election Day like no other.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Happy birthday to Nightly producer Tyler Weyant! Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from AARP:

More than 59,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. With cases continuing to spike across the country, desperate families are demanding Congress take immediate action. More lives can be saved if Congress makes sure necessary precautions are put in place. Take action

TALKING TO THE EXPERTS

Nightly’s Myah Ward asked: Where is the U.S. presidential election system most vulnerable to fraud?

“Out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast, we might see only a few dozen fraudulently cast, and those illegal votes will be found and prosecuted. But where we see a real problem is the fraud being perpetrated on the minds of the American electorate, telling them falsehoods about extensive voter fraud, or vote hacking, or that their votes don’t matter. And our enemies — autocracies that view democracy as a threat — amplify those messages in an attempt to weaken American democracy and our allies around the world. But there is a very effective way we can combat this fraud on the American public: Vote. Nothing weakens the fraud being perpetrated by Russia and others than strong, engaged, participating American citizens.” — David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research

“It is with absentee ballots because they are the ones most vulnerable to being stolen, altered, forged and forced. You can go into your polling place and vote in peace and no campaign staffers or candidates or party activists can be in there pressuring you. There's no such law preventing those people from showing up at your home and pressuring you to vote a particular way.

“The other big problem, you're relying on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots both to voters and from voters back to election officials in time to be counted. The Inspector General of the Postal Service just released a report on Wisconsin, in which he admitted that 3,500 ballots didn't get delivered to voters and hundreds of other ballots didn't get stamped by the Post Office when they were being sent back to election officials, which makes it impossible for election officials to know whether they can be counted or whether they were voted prior to the election.

“That brings up the big other big problem with mail in ballots, which is they have a much higher rejection rate than votes cast in person. And in New York City, the rejection rate for the ballots was one in five. That’s everything from signatures not matching to voters not providing all the information you have to provide when you send back an absentee ballot. The rejection rate is much higher because there's no election official in anybody's home to answer their questions and make sure they do it right.” — Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the election law initiative at The Heritage Foundation

“In 2016, Russian military intelligence systematically scanned, probed and penetrated America's electoral infrastructure. On Election Day itself, the Obama White House was running a secret crisis team, bracing for Russian hackers to manipulate the voter data and even vote tallies of U.S. citizens, not necessarily to alter the outcome of the election, but to cause chaos at polling places and undermine confidence in the results. No evidence of such a cyberattack emerged, but this threat persists.” — David Shimer, author of “Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference”

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

MONEYBALL — Once ignored, underfunded and often written off, Democratic state party organizations are harvesting record-setting cash heading into the 2020 election, reasserting their roles inside the Democratic infrastructure after suffering for years in competition with super PACs and campaigns, write Elena Schneider, David Siders and Zach Montellaro.

Those surges are happening in traditional swing states like Pennsylvania and Florida as well as emerging targets for Democrats like Texas and Arizona. The Arizona Democratic Party raised $4.6 million in the second quarter, a more than 300 percent increase over its haul at this point in 2016, while Texas is sitting on five times more cash than it had at this point in 2016. North Carolina banked more than doubled its 2016 totals, from $2.5 million to just under $6 million, and racked up its strong online fundraising numbers in June since late 2018. Wisconsin, a stand out among the states, brought in a record-breaking $10 million last quarter.

“A lot of donors are looking for the ‘Moneyball’ opportunity, where a dollar has the greatest possible impact,” said Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman, citing Michael Lewis’ book about the Oakland Athletics’ pioneering data-driven approach to baseball, a style that state parties are now trying to mimic with their own pitches to top donors. “State parties may not seem sexy, but when you dig into the numbers, then they have tremendous math appeal.”

FROM THE HEALTH DESK

VACCINE VENTURE — Nationwide distribution of any coronavirus vaccine will be a “joint venture” between the CDC, which typically oversees vaccine allocation, and the Department of Defense, a senior administration official said today.

The Department of Defense “is handling all the logistics of getting the vaccines to the right place, at the right time, in the right condition,” the official said in a call with reporters, health care reporter Sarah Owermohle writes. The official added that CDC will remain in charge of tracking any side effects that emerge post-vaccination and “some of the communications through the state relationships [and] the state public health organizations.”

The plan breaks with the longstanding precedent that CDC distributes vaccines during major outbreaks — such as bad flu seasons — through a centralized ordering system for state and local health officials.

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AROUND THE NATION

44 — Former President Barack Obama today delivered the eulogy at John Lewis’ funeral in Atlanta, where he issued a forceful call to action on voting rights and racial equity. “By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot,” he said.

FROM THE EDUCATION DESK

COLLEGE TRY — President Trump said today that he is looking at ways to extend the pause on monthly payments for federal student loans, an emergency benefit set to expire at the end of September. Speaking at the White House, Trump said he is considering extending the payment freeze that — without action — will end for some 40 million Americans just weeks before the November election.

“We also suspended student loan payments for six months,” the president said. “And we’re looking to do that additionally and for additional periods of time.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Trump was referring to executive action he would take or whether he would ask Congress to extend the CARES Act student loan relief, which expires Sept. 30.

PALACE INTRIGUE

HELLO AGAIN — A misleading video claiming hydroxychloroquine is a cure for coronavirus has gone viral. President Trump is back to touting the drug on national TV — despite mounting evidence that it’s ineffective. As Sarah Owermohle puts it in the latest episode of POLITICO Dispatch, “People thought the hydroxychloroquine debate was over,” and experts both inside and outside of the Trump administration are responding with “alarm and exhaustion.” Owermohle and Dan Diamond explain why the drug has made its way back in the national conversation.

20200730 Politico Dispatch audio marker

FOUR SQUARE

THE ZOOM PANEL — Eugene Daniels, Tim Alberta, Ryan Lizza and Laura Barrón-López discuss Trump’s musings about delaying the election, his effort to appeal to suburban voters and the fight for Covid relief on the latest episode of Four Square, recorded live.

 

NIGHTLY NUMBER

32.9 The percentage that the U.S. economy dropped on an annualized basis in the second quarter of this year. It’s the largest drop in GDP in seven decades of records.

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A Thai boxer wearing a face mask performs the "Wai khru ram muay,” a traditional dance, as he enters the ring today at the Radjadamnern Boxing Stadium in Bangkok. All boxers fighting at the stadium have to undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine before being allowed to compete in the televised matches. | Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images

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PARTING WORDS

NO COUNTRIES FOR YOUNG MEN — According to the United Nations' International Labor Organization, more than one in six people between the ages of 18 and 29 have stopped working since the beginning of the pandemic, Greta Privitera writes.

Those who didn't lose their job have seen their working hours fall by 23 percent.

Part of the reason the young have been particularly affected is that some 40 percent worked in sectors hardest hit by the crisis — such as tourism or health care — and nearly 77 percent of them held down informal or temporary work with little job security.

Young people across Europe have felt the effects of the crisis. In Germany, the number of people out of work is set to reach 3 million this summer, and in Britain, there are warnings that some 1 million people under 25 could be unemployed by the end of the year unless the government takes action. But the problem is particularly acute in Southern Europe.

In Spain, Greece, Italy and France, rigid labor markets have traditionally put long-term contracts out of reach of the young and led to higher-than-average youth unemployment rates. These countries also have important tourism industries, meaning they were hit particularly hard by travel restrictions and the cost of following new sanitary measures.

In Italy, half the jobs destroyed by the pandemic were held by people under 35. The number of employed people under 24 in May decreased by 11 percent compared with last year. By comparison, in the 35-49 age range, employment fell by 4 percent, and for people over 50, employment grew by 0.9 percent.

A message from AARP:

SENIORS DEMAND ACTION

It is an outrage that more than 59,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. Cases are continuing to spike across the country and Congress must act now to help save lives in these facilities.

Protect nursing home residents with AARP’s five-point plan calling for:
1. Regular, ongoing testing and adequate personal protective equipment (PPE)
2. Transparency focused on daily, public reporting of cases and deaths in facilities; communication with families about discharges and transfers; and, funding accountability.
3. Access to facilitated virtual visitation.
4. Better care for residents through adequate staffing, oversight, and access to in-person formal advocates (called long-term care ombudsmen)
5. No blanket immunity to long-term care facilities related to COVID-19.

Tell Congress to act now to protect the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Take action

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Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam

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