Today, Explained - Vote and die
Episode Date: April 8, 2020Wisconsinites had to choose between catching Covid-19 and voting on Tuesday. Is the rest of the country next? (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
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It's Wednesday, April 8th, 2020, and we lost John Prine last night.
I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and this is your coronavirus update from Today Explained.
If you don't know John, chances are you know his music.
He was your favorite songwriter's favorite songwriter.
John would have said he was in heaven before he died on Tuesday due to COVID-19 complications at the age of 73.
I am an old woman named after my mother.
My old man is another child that's grown old.
If dreams were lightning Thunder were desire
This old house would have burnt down
A long time
ago
Make me an
angel
The flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go
Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race for president today.
It's officially the Donald and Joe show, so pour one out for Bernard.
The daily death toll from this coronavirus in the United States peaked on Tuesday with nearly 2,000 fatalities in one day.
We've lost roughly 13,000 Americans in this pandemic at this point with something like
400,000 confirmed cases. Nearly a third of people living in apartments in the United States didn't
make April rent, according to an organization that tracks these kinds of things. It's pretty
clear that people will need more help from the government. Democratic leaders announced today
that they want $250 billion in aid for food programs, states,
and hospitals on top of $250 billion the Trump administration has asked for to support businesses.
Democrats also want to make sure half of that business stimulus will be reserved for businesses
owned by farmers, veterans, people of color, and women, which is probably for the best because
new data from the Labor Department suggests the majority of jobs lost so far in this country were held by women. And if it wasn't official
before, it is now. The coronavirus has hit rural America. The New York Times reports that more than
two-thirds of the country's rural counties are now reporting cases, with one in 10 counties
reporting at least one death. The case rate has more than doubled in the last week.
I think that's enough bad news for now.
Here's a little more John Prine before we start the show.
When I get to heaven, I'm going to shake God's hand,
thank him for more blessings Than one man can stand
Then I'm gonna get a guitar
And start a rock and roll band
Check into a swell hotel
Ain't the afterlife grand?
And then I'm gonna get a cocktail
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette
That's nine miles long I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss
that pretty girl
I'm gonna tell the world
Cause this old
man is going to
town Sean Johnson, you're the Capitol Bureau Chief for Wisconsin Public Radio.
On Tuesday, Wisconsin held a primary.
Why did Wisconsin do that?
Wisconsin did that because it was in our state law.
This was not just a presidential primary. This is an election for a number of races like a state Supreme Court race
here, a lot of local races like mayor, we have county executives here. And so those were all
on the ballot. And so if the election was going to be moved, it was going to take an agreement from our governor, a Democrat, and our legislature,
which is run by Republicans, that didn't happen. And so the ultimate product was people went out
to vote on Tuesday, despite regular objections from state government and from federal government
to avoid large crowds like the ones you saw yesterday.
And to be clear here, Wisconsin has stay-at-home orders in place like much of the rest of the country?
Yeah, definitely.
So it's been a few weeks now since our governor closed dine-in service at restaurants and bars.
Schools have been closed for a few weeks now.
The stay-at-home order has been in place for a while,
so there are still a lot of places like grocery stores, a lot of retailers, manufacturers, a lot of places that are open.
But we are under a stay-at-home order, and we're warned on the regular to avoid large gatherings.
Those limitations did not apply to the election, though. You know, this is a point of some contention in Wisconsin, as you saw long lines of people in Milwaukee and Green Bay in particular going out to vote.
Before we get to how the actual primary went yesterday, tell us more about the fight to get
there because it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more dramatic. Why was there such a fight about this election? Why
wasn't everyone in the state just on board with doing it a little later,
like we've seen across the country? I think you have to go back a few weeks.
At that point, this is when our governor, Democrat Tony Evers, was first closing things down.
And he was asked at that point, what about the election?
The governor told 12 News, unless a judge intervenes, the election next week is on.
It's extreme burden on everybody. I get that.
But at the end of the day, using today as an example, we will have an election on April 7th.
And so his position at that point was the same as our Republican legislative leaders.
Do the election. We'll get it done.
We have to do this because we have to have continuity of government.
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolved and people's views on it evolved, Governor Tony Evers changed.
And so he began to push for a move to a mail-in election. He tried to call the
legislature into special session a week ago to deal with this. There's only so much he can do
on that front. He can call them into a special session. He can't force them to act. And so they
had somebody gavel in and gavel out of the session because they didn't support his decided to take the extraordinary act of calling for
an executive order to try to block the election himself.
I cannot in good conscience stand by and do nothing. The bottom line is that I have an
obligation to keep people safe, and that's why I signed this executive order today.
The Republican legislature appealed that decision.
About four hours later, our state Supreme Court, which is run by, we don't have technically
Republicans and Democrats in the court, but it has a big conservative majority.
They ruled against the governor, said he had overstepped his authority.
And that was that.
That's when we knew the election was going to happen.
So how did that go in practice yesterday?
What did it look like when people had to choose between voting and potentially dying?
I mean, I have mixed emotions about it.
I think I'm concerned not enough people will get out to vote.
Just because it's a sort of almost taking a back seat to public health crisis going on.
I will tell you that elections in Wisconsin are very localized.
And so I'm based in Madison, Wisconsin.
I went to a few polling places yesterday.
It was pretty quiet.
It was surreal because you had poll workers wearing a lot of protective gear,
you know, masks, goggles, gloves, plexiglass face shields for some poll workers. Those were provided
by the city government in Madison. So especially prepared. Really where I was, there were no lines.
There was a lot of space for people to vote. I went to a gymnasium where they had polling places spread out just huge distances,
think like down by the basket and then at half court line. Now you contrast that to some places
that had fewer polling places open and a lot of voters, namely Milwaukee. Milwaukee,
which is where our African-American population is predominantly located in Wisconsin.
Milwaukee normally had 180 polling places on an election day where people go and cast their votes.
On Tuesday, they had five polling places.
Wow.
In Milwaukee, you had the lines.
African-American voter turnout is already going to be low for a spring election like this.
It's a nonpartisan race.
We usually have low turnout for this race anyway.
And so then you couple that with all the complications that were put on the shoulders of Milwaukee voters yesterday.
And, you know, that makes it more difficult to vote.
You couple that with COVID-19 cases in Milwaukee have hit Milwaukee's African
American population the hardest. Our governor has called it a crisis within a crisis. This is
something we're still learning about, but it's a very real fear in Milwaukee's African American
community. What were voters saying about this truly insane choice they were asked to make?
I'm over 60, and that irritates me that, you know, we're putting ourselves at risk to come and exercise our civic duties.
And I just think that's wrong.
So everybody who can shows up and does everything they can.
But I think it was a very bad decision.
You know, a lot of them said that they wished that the election had been postponed,
but that if it was going to happen, they felt that they needed to get out there and vote.
They said they needed to kind of counteract what they saw as voter suppression.
You know, they felt like just by having the election in the middle of a pandemic, there were going to be lots of people who did not turn out and vote.
And so they felt like it was their duty to do that. There were some people who just said,
I like voting. I feel connected to my community when I go out and vote. And they didn't even
actually want to return an absentee ballot. And they were in protective gear, but
they've been sitting at home, some of them by themselves for weeks. And they kind of looked
forward to getting out and voting despite the
health warnings. And then you heard similar things from poll workers. It was not their first choice
to be out there handling ballots, interacting with people. But given their view of the importance of
the vote, they felt that they needed to be out there on those front lines.
Did you get a sense of how many people couldn't make it out because there were
exponentially fewer polling places and because who knows how many complications this moment
caused on people's weighing whether they would go out to vote or not in the first place?
We'll have more information about that next Monday.
But turnout is down for in-person voting.
You had a record number of people request absentee ballots by mail.
And so those are still being tabulated.
They're being tabulated until Monday.
I know that anecdotally that there are reports all over the state of people saying
they wanted to do the
right thing here, request an absentee ballot, stay home on election day, get that ballot in the mail,
mail it back. And a lot of people all over the state are saying they didn't get the ballots.
They requested it weeks ago and it never came. So they were faced with the choice on election day of, do I stay home and not have my vote
counted?
Or do I go out and risk my public health, according to the CDC in the state of Wisconsin,
to go cast this vote?
So that's kind of a situation where the system seems to fail.
And I don't know where it failed.
And I think that's something that we'll be examining for weeks to come, is what is the deal with these people who requested absentee ballots,
tried to do the right thing, and didn't get them, and we're left with this impossible choice on I know what you're thinking.
What's going to happen if we still need to social distance in November?
What does this mean for the Donald and Joe show?
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Nate Persley is a law professor at Stanford University, but he spends a lot of his time
thinking about our elections and how we do them.
I do.
He was the research director for the President's Commission
on Election Administration in 2013.
So I asked him what he made of what happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday.
Well, this situation truly is unprecedented.
We've had other natural disasters before, like hurricanes and the like,
but we've never had the particular challenges
that this pandemic poses for running an election.
Yesterday in Wisconsin, we saw the kind of perfect storm of problems where political
dysfunction met logistical difficulties to produce an election that was sort of barely
above what was necessary in order to get people to the polls and to get them to cast a ballot.
Right. We heard from others, Sean, earlier, they didn't have enough polling stations. And
even more tragically, they were nowhere near ready for this unprecedented demand for absentee
ballots. How prepared is the rest of the country to deal with vote by mail in the wake of this
pandemic? There are several states that run their elections almost entirely by mail.
Those are Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii.
They should have the easiest time with respect to dealing with the pandemic.
And then there are other Western states like Arizona and California,
where about two-thirds of the voters vote by mail,
and they have robust mail balloting
procedures in place, so they should be okay. Battleground states have instances of vote by
mail that are under 5% or so, and so they're going to have the toughest time. I think what we saw in
Wisconsin this past election is emblematic of what we might see in many states that don't have
a traditional mail balloting. However, let's be clear, Wisconsin did do some good things,
and they sort of provide data for later states as they start to contemplate how to adapt to this
new environment. One of them is that they were able to call out the National Guard to serve as poll workers. Over 2,400 National Guard members showed up at the polls, and they were an absolutely
critical part of the election day mobilization that needed to happen in order to pull off the
election. It's still the case that they had much fewer polling places than they had had in previous
elections, and so a lot of the
consolidation of polling places no doubt confused voters. And as I said, you know, the day before,
they weren't even sure whether they were going to have the election on Tuesday. And so there was
so much back and forth that many voters were probably left stranded.
So what's it going to take to get some of these critical states,
battleground states, ready and ramped up for mail-in voting?
Well, the first thing we need is money.
And we need Congress to quadruple the amount of money
that was in the last bill that dealt with elections.
So they appropriated $400 million
that would be sent through the Election Assistance Commission
to the states.
But that's for the entire country.
The battleground states are going to get a tiny share of that.
And so we need the resources at the federal and state level,
especially now that states are going to be tightening their budgets
because of the recession that's caused by the virus.
But beyond money, we need logistical assistance to the states
for them to make the transition.
The same kinds of economic forces that are making it difficult for us,
for example, to adequately supply medical officials
with face masks and ventilators,
are going to make it difficult for polling places and election officials
to get the equipment that they need in order to run this election.
Whether you're talking about high-speed scanners and other types of equipment for mail balloting,
or if you're talking about the personal protective gear and other kinds of accommodations for the
polling places. So we need money, we need logistical help, and frankly, we need political
will. We need the states to start taking this seriously immediately
for November, because any election official will tell you that if you don't have in place a plan
five months before the November election, there's the chance that you're going to be out of luck
when that election comes around. Political will isn't looking great, right? Wisconsin's fight
went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. The president this morning tweeted, Republicans should fight very hard when it comes
to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter
fraud and for whatever reason doesn't work out well for Republicans. Even though yesterday he
admitted that he votes by mail. Sure, I could vote by mail because I'm allowed to. Well, that's called out of state. You know
why I voted? Because I happen to be in the White House and I won't be able to go to Florida and
vote. Seems wildly hypocritical, but is there any truth to this argument he's making that there's
more fraud if people vote by mail? There's very little fraud in American elections.
But when there is fraud, it is more likely to occur in the mail balloting, even though it's
rare. And a lot of that is because mail balloting actually occurs outside the watchful eye of
poll workers. And so you don't actually have observation of the voters when they cast the ballot. But fraud is rare. And
I feel like the politicization of vote by mail was something that could have been avoided
at the front end. But now it's a really unfortunate consequence of the last two to three
weeks, which is that now you have the party staking out very different positions on vote by
mail. But, you know, it's one of these things where you have to figure outaking out very different positions on vote by mail.
But, you know, it's one of these things where you have to figure out a safe way for people to vote somehow. So if you're not going to shift people to vote by mail, then you have to spend several
billion dollars making sure that our polling places are up and running in November. Because
right now what jurisdictions are confronting is a shortage of adequate polling
places because many people don't want to have 700 people coming through their facilities on
election day because of the contagion from the virus. And they're losing poll workers because
very few of them want to be serving and seeing crowds on election day. And so you have to deal
with that problem of site and poll worker shortage in order
to provide an adequate personal voting alternative. Otherwise, you've got to really shift a lot of
people to vote by mail and to early polling place voting. But just to be clear here, the debate,
the politics of all this, it's insincere. There isn't a great risk of voter fraud if we vote by mail. Republicans are just worried
that there'll be more Democratic votes? Well, look, I think that there are a lot of good reasons
to be cautious about vote by mail. Many of them are logistical, that, you know, we should,
it's very difficult to run an adequate vote-by-mail option.
And in fact, there are many civil rights groups
that are very concerned about a complete shift to vote-by-mail,
in part because racial minorities are often more attracted
to going to polling places than to trusting the males with their vote.
And so there's plenty of criticism of vote-by-mail
on both the left and the right.
But as I said, there is sort of no other option.
We're going to have to shift tens of millions of voters to mail balloting if we are under
conditions of the pandemic that are similar to what we're seeing in the primaries.
And then beyond that, we need to make sure that we have adequate resources for the polling
places to function.
And if we don't come to some consensus on how we can best address voting while dealing with this pandemic, if there's still real concerns about social distancing and safety
during the general election come November, what's it going to mean for the election?
What's it going to mean for the election? What's it going to mean for the results?
Well, if states don't act in the next few months to try to design an election under pandemic conditions, we are in real trouble. And they need to prepare now, even if we're
lucky enough not to have pandemic conditions in the fall. I mean, one of my chief worries
is that we're going to see over
the summer a subsiding in concerns about the pandemic because people will be sort of liberated
from these shelter-in-place orders. But then when the virus comes back in the fall and early winter,
that we're going to be back here again. So they have to start preparing now to get the logistical help that they need in order to prepare for the election.
And if we are unable to make those preparations very soon, then there's the risk that we have a sort of Bush versus Gore on steroids problem, where you do have contested elections in different states and it ends up in the courts. You know, I've been working a lot in the last few years on
voting and democracy and the internet, dealing with platforms like Facebook and the like here
in Silicon Valley. And I thought that the real concern this election was going to be similar to
what we had in 2016, where people were worried about Russian hacking and the like, foreign intervention, disinformation. And so while confidence and
concerns were really an issue coming into the election, you now overlay upon that all the
concerns and doubts that the virus is posing for election administration. And so we are in a very
vulnerable position when it comes to
confidence in the democracy and the basic machinery of elections,
and the virus and potential lack of preparation for it is only going to make things worse. Thank you.