THE VIRUS AND THE VOTE: ADMINISTERING THE 2020 ELECTION IN A PANDEMIC (Stanford-MIT)

[Nevilledog]

A Compendium of Research from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project

https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/The-Virus-and-the-Vote-Stanford-MIT-Healthy-Elections-Project.pdf


The first COVID-19-related death in the United States was announced on February 29, 2020, the day of the South Carolina primary. International news about the early spread of the coronavirus and the initial reaction from American public health professionals to its quick spread in this country made it clear that the presidential election was facing an existential threat. Election officials who held primaries in early- and mid-March found themselves increasingly making public health decisions to guard both their voters and their staff. The larger societal challenges quickly overwhelmed the ability of states to hold primaries at all, leading to hastily canceled and postponed elections. The one early primary that was not postponed, Wisconsin, provided cautionary tales in the form of closed polling places, poll worker shortages, and massive transitions to mail balloting.

This legal, social, and public health turmoil prompted lawyers and interest-group advocates to marshall for a fight to secure the right to vote. As important as much of this work was, our instinct was that litigation would only go so far, if election officials did not have the tools, resources, and information they needed to administer healthy, secure, and well-run elections. What was missing, we thought, was a non-partisan evidence-based approach to election management during a pandemic.

Out of that ambition, the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project was born. As the first cases of COVID-19 were being reported in late February, we had already been approached by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation about creating a university-based effort to help provide the public with reliable information about the administrative challenges the nation would face in the upcoming election. Even before the pandemic hit, the 2020 election faced significant challenges from disinformation, polarization, and eroding confidence in democratic institutions. The pandemic exacerbated these problems and posed many new ones that election administrators had never confronted.

The two of us had worked together previously as part of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) in 2013. The last successful bipartisan effort on election reform, the PCEA dealt with a host of problems evident in the 2012 election, ranging from long polling place lines to election technology to natural disasters and voting. Pandemics were not on the agenda back then, but the Commission’s orientation toward providing practical solutions derived from the experience of local administrators provided a model for how we might approach the challenges that COVID-19 posed to the 2020 election.

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This is a massive resource.

[crickets]

1. Wow. Lots of info - thanks, Nevilledog. K&R for visibility.

[Nevilledog]

2. ...