Consider This from NPR - Slow Mail, Misinformation, And The Pandemic: What Could Go Wrong On Election Day 2020

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

Rosa Brooks, law professor at Georgetown University, recently helped organize an experiment to game out what might happen if the winner on election night isn't immediately clear. She explains what she found. And NPR's Sally Herships reports on cuts at the postal service — and concerns they're politically motivated. Garrett Graff wrote about how election day could go off the rails for Politico Magazine.Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Next week, Joe Biden says he will name a running mate. By that time, it will be less than three months until Election Day. The president has been tweeting about that day a lot. Most of what he has said is just not true, so we're not going to repeat it here. What is true is that the election will take place on November 3rd. And that it might not be pretty. The COVID-19 pandemic, under the best of circumstances this fall,

is going to influence every aspect of this election. Garrett Graff has written in Politico magazine about all the ways this election could go off the rails. We're going to see elderly poll workers unable to actually man the polls. We're going to see college students not in the places where they are normally supposed to be in November. And we're going to see the Postal Service challenged by its own response to the pandemic even before it begins to handle the wave of additional absentee and mail-in ballots caused by the pandemic.

Coming up, how some of this stuff could play out and how misinformation could make things even worse. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It is Friday, July 31st. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Integrative Therapeutics, creator of Physician's Elemental Diet, a medical food developed by clinicians for the dietary management of IBS, IBD, and SIBO under the supervision of a physician. Remember what happened in April in Wisconsin? Despite the heroic efforts and good work of our local election officials, poll workers, and National Guard troops, there's not a sufficiently safe way to administer in-person voting tomorrow. Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, decided at the last minute

that it wasn't safe to have a primary during a pandemic. Republicans immediately challenged his decision in court. Election confusion just hours after Governor Tony Evers issued an order to suspend in-person voting tomorrow. The state Supreme Court overturned that order. The election did happen, but even as late as the afternoon before, voters still didn't know if the polls would be open. Patrick, so much going on here at the state capitals today. Yes, that was just one primary in one state.

And let's be clear, only Congress can change the presidential election. But still, in a lot of places, voting is already hard enough. Former President Obama pointed that out this week. There are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting. Many states use outdated equipment or have cut back on polling locations. And targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision. And now we have a pandemic on top of all that. By Election Day, it is possible that 200,000 people

will have died of coronavirus. That's the same as the entire population of Montgomery, Alabama. Just gone. Coronavirus is a huge reason why voting by mail is so important this year. But the Trump administration is cutting overtime for U.S. Postal Service workers, which could mean slower mail at a time when millions more people are going to need it to vote. NPR's Sally Herships reports on that. Barb Byram is clerk for Ingham County in Michigan. She's the chief election official, so the idea of mail being delayed

does not sit well with her. So this is extraordinarily concerning because Michigan law requires that the ballot be in the possession of the local clerk by the time polls close on election day. Byram is worried because she says her county has already been experiencing delays due to the pandemic. She knows because she issues death certificates and funeral homes aren't getting them. It was taking well over three weeks for them to get death certificates that were mailed from literally 15 miles away. And just ask her if it takes longer for rural areas like the part of the county she lives in to get its mail. Oh, my soul it does. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I live out in the rural

portion of my county and it has historically always taken a day or two or maybe three more days for me to get mail. Yeah. Yeah. So Byram is worried that voters, especially in rural areas, will not be able to mail their ballots back on time. The National Vote at Home Institute says to save money, many rural communities opt for a cheaper but slower non-profit postage rate. If they switch to first class to try to get mail out faster, it could double their costs. And to make things even more complicated, every state has its own rules and regulations around voting by mail, and those rules are not delay-friendly. Traditionally, all mail picked up on any given day is postmarked that day. Even if it takes until after midnight, it still receives the same day's postmark. Tammy Patrick is a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund,

a nonprofit foundation. So for states that a ballot has to be postmarked by election day or by whatever the deadline, it's quite possible under this new regime that a ballot wouldn't get its postmarked until the next day. And that could, in fact, disenfranchise a voter. Then Patrick says that in a number of states, voters can request ballots just days before an election. The problem is, if the mail is slow, you may not be able to mail back your vote in time. And she says billions of pieces of political mail go through the mail stream, and ballots are just a small part of that. Those candidates and campaigns and political action committees and political parties are investing billions of dollars into the mail stream, and they want to make sure that their mail is moving as well. And so do the many local governments that are required by state law to

send out election materials in a timely manner. I'm scared that it's not going to happen. This is a mail carrier in Pennsylvania. We're not using her name because she's worried about losing her job if she speaks out. She points to the new head of the Postal Service, the close ally of President Trump's. Trump makes frequent false claims that mail-in ballots lead to widespread fraud. This mail carrier and others worry that these cost-cutting measures could also be an attempt to disrupt the election. And I'm scared that that's almost voter suppression, like it's being done on purpose. She says the Postal Service reaches every American, regardless of their political standpoint. I mean, for goodness sake, I think the Grand Canyon, we reach people

by a donkey. It's a mule, actually, a non-partisan mail carrier. As for the post office, it says it's doing all it can to provide prompt and reliable service. And Tammy Patrick of the Democracy Fund says there's an easy fix. If you're voting by mail, vote early. NPR's Sally Herships. So yeah, the thing we all need to get used to is that we just might not know the results of the election right away. It could take days or even weeks for ballots that were postmarked on election day to be counted. And that's not bad or even that unusual.

In a presidential election, though, the question is, what happens while we wait? Turns out a group of political operatives, research scientists, and former government officials recently spent a day trying to game that out. We had about 70 or 80 people. We put them on two teams. We had a Team Trump, a Trump campaign team, a Team Biden. Rosa Brooks helped organize this experiment with a group that calls itself the Transition Integrity Project. Some of them are Democrats, some are Republicans. Others played the role of the media or career civil servants. And they basically ran through a few scenarios. A decisive win for Trump, a decisive win for Biden, or a scenario where we don't know who won on election night.

Rosa Brooks told my colleague Ari Shapiro what happened. In each of our exercises, the Trump campaign team came right out of the gate, tried to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, tried to assert that they were fraudulent. In all of our scenarios, the team that feared an electoral ballot count loss attempted to persuade legislators, state-level legislators and governors sympathetic to them to send rival slates of electors to Congress. We had both sides attempting to mobilize street protesters. And I can say that in each of the exercises, the players playing the Trump team were significantly more willing to play fast and loose with the truth than the team playing the Biden campaign. It seems like one of the big takeaways is that a lot of what governs the transfer of power is not rules, but traditions. And this is a president who has not hesitated to abandon all kinds of traditions. I think that's absolutely right. And the president tweeted out a comment

suggesting that he believed the presidential election perhaps should be delayed. Which we need to note the president does not have the authority to do. Which the president does not have the authority to do, but you can also attempt to use disinformation campaign to keep people from turning out and voting. You know, if you announce the night before the election, I have canceled the election, don't go tomorrow, you don't necessarily need to actually have that power if you can persuade enough confused voters that they shouldn't bother to vote because the polls are closed. That's a win. You've been really clear that you don't have a crystal ball and you're not predicting the future. That said, can you just take us into the room when the simulation was over and everybody was kind of taking stock of what they experienced?

What was that conversation like? I think people were kind of shell-shocked. I think all of us, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, you know, everyone has a little bit of a bias towards stability in the status quo. We say things like, oh, come on, it's always been fine. The U.S. is fine. Everything will be fine. Look at the election of 2000. There weren't riots. There wasn't a coup. It was fine. And I think actually pushing people to see there's a very real chance that it won't be fine if you all sit back and just assume it will be fine. If you want it to be fine, if you want this to be a normal, free and fair election, you need to be thinking right now about how we protect the integrity of the election and the transition. Rosa Brooks, talking to my colleague Ari Shapiro.

Additional reporting in this episode from our colleagues at All Things Considered. For more news, download the NPR One app or listen to your local public radio station. Supporting that station makes this podcast possible. This show is produced by Brianna Scott, Ann Lee, Lee Hale, and Brent Bachman and edited by Beth Donovan and Sammy Yenigan. Our executive producer is Cara Tallo. Just want to say one more thing here. Gabriela Saldivia is one of the producers who helped start this show all the way back in March. We have done more than 100 episodes since then, and she made every one of them better. She is now back at her old job with the team at NPR One.

We just want to say, Gabriela, thank you so much for everything, and we're glad you're not far away. We will be back with more next week. Thanks for listening. I'm Kelly McEvers. Until recently, Edmund Hong says he didn't speak out against racism because he was scared. My parents told me not to speak up because they were scared. But I'm tired of this. Listen now on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.