[EL] Draft paper on preparing for the 2020 Election

[Michael McDonald]

I've been compiling information for a book on voting in the time of the
coronavirus, and have started to develop recommendations from states'
primary voting experiences so far. I'd add to Nate's list:

1. States should create a rapid deployment force available to fill in if a
local election office goes down. We've seen Fulton County, GA have a
COVID19 death, and the county has just cleared their backlog on mail ballot
requests. We'll see if this affects ballot return rates. There are two
other rural Georgia counties that had to shut their offices temporarily for
a positive case from a voter or staff member. If we see a second wave
(likely), then we could see more of isolated hot spots come November.

2. States should do postmortems on their primaries or special elections, if
possible. There are any number of issues that we don't know about yet. The
Wisconsin Elections Commission's report is a good best practice. For
example, they note how the Milwaukee absentee ballot request portal become
overloaded, which likely resulted in incomplete absentee ballot requests,
and recommended preventative action for November. More of this is desirable.

3. Monitoring of mail ballots. Most states produce absentee ballot files in
near real-time. Anomaly detection analysis might identify local troubles
before they become news stories. Related, local officials need to have a
staff person assigned to do the required data entry. Note that this will
not be an option for some excuse-required states that do not have robust
absentee ballot reporting systems, and are unlikely to be able to create
one by this fall. Good communication channels between state and local
officials will be required.

4. The post office should create a crisis response team to address concerns
from election officials. Wisconsin noted two unexplained situations
involving the post office where better communication might have helped.

There's more, but these are the big ones for me.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, University of Florida
703-772-1440 (c)
352-273-2371 (w)
www.electproject.org
@ElectProject


On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 2:51 AM Nate Persily <npersily at law.stanford.edu>
wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> Attached is a draft of a paper making concrete recommendations on how to
> prepare for the 2020 election.  Eager to  get any comments you might have.
>
> Best wishes,
> Nate
>
> ----------------
>
> Nate Persily
>
> James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
> Stanford Law School
> 559 Nathan Abbott Way
> Stanford, CA 94305-8610
> (917) 570-3223
> npersily at stanford.edu
>
> www.persily.com
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