Commentary: Mail-in ballots only safe option for election

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion

Mail-in voting is the best way to ensure that the November 2020 election can proceed safely despite the coronavirus pandemic. It’s all too likely we’ll still be dealing with outbreaks then, and it’s well before we’ll have a vaccine. The U.S. needs to start making plans for mail-in ballots now; and yet President Trump has begun to make it clear he intends to stymie any large-scale vote-by-mail efforts.

Mail-in voting will become the key battleground because it’s essentially the only realistic option for holding an election during a pandemic. Trump can’t delay the Nov. 3 vote; that’s beyond his constitutional power. In fact, the Constitution doesn’t provide any option for suspending or delaying a presidential or congressional election.

Congress “may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes,” according to the Constitution, but precedent makes it pretty certain that Congress won’t delay the presidential election either; it didn’t do so even in 1864, when the Civil War was in full swing.

What about the states? Well, technically, individual states could choose their presidential electors themselves, without holding a popular vote. That’s the way states did it in the early decades of the Republic. That history has led some fretful folks to ask me whether some state legislatures might call off the 2020 vote and just let their electors decide how to allocate the states electoral votes. In practice, though, it seems unlikely to the point of impossibility that governors and state legislatures would steal the election from the public.

Hence the dispute over mail-in ballots. Conventional wisdom is that mail-in voting would be good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. I am far from certain that the conventional wisdom will prove to be true, since mail-in voting under pandemic conditions may actually disadvantage some key Democratic constituencies (like young voters, or poor ones, or elderly African-Americans) more than it disadvantages Republican voting blocs. But President Trump seems to be inclined to accept the conventional wisdom.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/commentary-mail-in-ballots-only-safe-option-for-election/

[lagomorph777]

1. Which is exactly why Trump is trying to kill the US Postal Service.

[LTG]

2. State issue

Under the Constitution the federal government only sets the date of the election, the electoral college system and basic qualification to hold the offices.

All other election decisions are left to the states. Each state determines it’s own means of casting ballots. I haven’t noticed any state legislatures or governors rushing to go to mail in ballots, except for absentee ballots.

I am sure there are state deadlines for mailing out ballots. That would also establish rules and deadlines as to requesting absentee ballots. Most of those deadlines will also require legislative action to change.

What possible logistical problems might exist in ordering, receiving and delivering enough ballots for every registered voter in the state. A deadline will also have to be established for registering to vote as well as address changes. The easiest problem to solve will be setting up places for same day registration and picking up/dropping off ballots in states that allow such things.

Everyone should be all over their state legislatures to deal with this in a timely manner. It’s not something Congress can do, and as I’ve said, I don’t see any urgency in the states to do any of this.