[EL] Accommodating a Massive Surge in Absentee Voting For the Presidential Election

[Pildes, Rick]

I fully support efforts to educate the media, to educate the public in turn, that we might not know who won the election on Election Night this fall.  But I also believe it’s at least as important for our election policies this fall to do what they can to avoid getting into this situation in the first place.

To that end, I’ve written a piece coming out soon in the U. Chicago Law Review Online on changes to key dates in the election calendar that state legislatures and Congress ought to consider making for the fall.  Here is the link<https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3613163> and abstract:
This fall, most states are likely to see a massive surge in absentee voting. The significantly greater burdens absentee ballots impose on election administration, compared to in-person voting, are not widely appreciated. Unless certain key dates in the election calendar are changed to take this unprecedented surge into account, the structural integrity and legitimacy of the election could be called into doubt.
The date changes suggested here have three specific objectives. First, to enable as many absentee ballots as possible to be counted on (rather than after) Election Night. If tens of thousands of votes cannot be counted until many days after the election, with the front-runner on Election Night turning out to lose, this increases the risk of the loser and his supporters declaring the process “rigged.” Minimizing that risk must be a key focal point of election-administration this fall. Second, to give election officials enough time to complete the complicated task of processing all these ballots fairly and properly. Third, to give voters an adequate opportunity to vote in the novel circumstances this fall might pose.
The changes identified in this essay involve state law and the federal law that governs the final stage of the presidential election, The Electoral Count Act. The date the electoral college votes should be pushed back to accommodate the longer time states are likely to need to process properly levels of absentee voting that might be an order of magnitude greater than in normal times.

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