‘The Whole Voting Universe Has Been Turned Upside Down by Covid’

Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld about how to vote, for the August 21, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: There are more ways to make your voice heard than voting in presidential elections, for sure, but voting remains a primary means of societal participation. And organizing the vote can be a powerful tool for community engagement and education—with impacts well beyond electoral politics.

Given that this is 2020, listeners don’t need to hear all the reasons voting is critical. But given that this is 2020, we have plenty of questions and concerns about how to do it.

Our next guest is engaged with that critical and evolving set of questions. Reporter and author Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. His most recent book is Democracy Betrayed: How Superdelegates, Redistricting, Party Insiders and the Electoral College Rigged the 2016 Election.

He joins us now by phone from San Francisco. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.

Steven Rosenfeld: Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

JJ: You have just written “The 2020 Fall Voter Guide: How to Make Sure Your Vote Counts,” and I would love to have you just talk us through some of the key elements there; my sense is that maybe the first thing is: act early.

SR: Yes. Basically, people need to make a plan—and a lot of people are beginning to say this now; we heard this at the Democratic Convention. But what making a plan really means is getting ahead of what’s going to be bureaucratic crunches and bottlenecks. Because the whole voting universe has been turned upside down by Covid, and what that means is that people are going to be unfamiliar with all the steps—including election officials and poll workers. So let’s talk about what people really need to do.

First of all, there’s three ways you can vote, and you have to figure out which one is going to work for you.  You can vote by mail, or you can receive a ballot in the mail, then you can decide how you want to return it. Then you can vote early, which is at an in-person location, not necessarily a polling place; sometimes it’s a county office, city hall. And then there’s Election Day, which is November 3, which is also in-person.

Steven Rosenfeld: “It’s more important than ever not just to be registered, but to really, really make sure your registration information is correct.”

And in all those cases, it’s more important than ever not just to be registered, but to really, really make sure your registration information is correct. Because, if you’re going to be voting from home, the way that you’re going to get that ballot, and the way that that ballot is going to be vetted, whenever it’s returned, it’s going to be checked against your address, and the spelling of your name, and your signature—probably on your driver’s license.

So we can talk about this a little bit, but really, it all starts with getting your registration information up to date—and you can check online with almost every state for that. And then it gets a little more complicated, the whole voting-by-mail thing.

JJ: Do it.

SR: Here’s the thing about voting by mail: East of the Rockies, before Covid, most states did not have high volumes of people. States like Florida, which were one of the highest, maybe had a quarter of the people voting by mail. So what does that mean? It means, in most states, you have to apply to get a ballot. Now that’s a separate process, that’s a second application.

Now, some states—there are a handful, like New Jersey and Vermont—that are east of the Rockies will be sending out ballots, so voters don’t have to do anything, except being registered.

But in other states, you’ll either be getting an application sent to you (if you have registered), or if you have voted in the last couple of years, you’ll get one. If you haven’t voted in like three or four years, you might have to re-register, or check your registration, or update everything, so you’re not left off.

And then, in other states like Ohio, you’re totally on your own. You’ve got to figure out how to get an application—which usually means going online and downloading it and printing it. So it’s really a range.

JJ: It sounds like a lot of what you’re saying is that different states are different, and so you can’t just assume. Like maybe you hear a news story that says, “Oh, there’s going to be drop boxes!” But that might not be in your state, that might not be applicable to you. So it sounds like there’s really no substitute for proactively informing yourself about what the particular rules and regulations and processes are for your state, and better to do that early than to sit back and imagine it’s gonna come to you.

SR: When I talk to people who actually are developing the apps that, like, the Democratic campaigns are going to be using, and a lot of people are going to be using, they say that the best information is at your local county election office; you really want to deal with them. They say there are time lags between updating statewide government records and rolls; you really don’t want to deal with any middlemen. You don’t want to deal with non-profits, I have to say—and I work for one that does do voter registration, among other things.

Because you have to make sure that the people who will be sending you a ballot, or giving you one at a polling place, have your information, and it’s correct. And you can’t necessarily trust that somebody else is going to do it for you.

Now you’re right, it really varies state by state, and within some states, even varies county to county.

National Memo (8/31/20)

So let me tell you about one thing that I’ve been looking at this week, and I can’t get clear answers on. This is a perfect indication about why people have to be proactive, and there’s more work. In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the three final swing states for 2016, the application forms to request an absentee ballot in the primaries have multiple boxes to check on them. And some people just checked, “I want it for the primary,” and some people just checked, “I want it for the rest of the year,” and nobody can tell me how many people did either one.

So that means that some people may have checked boxes, thinking, “Oh, I got this in the primary, I’m all set!” Or they did it in such a rush, because the pandemic was breaking, they don’t remember.

What that means is that people, if they’re going to vote by mail, they have to go back and either update or confirm or apply again: It’s a big pain in the butt.

But this is a starting-line detail, it’s a small thing that has such big consequences—and this is indicative of the landscape we’re in. Now we can talk about other things, but really, this  starting line, if you want to be in the game, not just being registered, you’ve gotta be on track to get that mailed out ballot.

JJ: Absolutely. And just as people, it’s going to be very frustrating to read on November 4 about chaos in the polling places, and confusion. It’s the story now, about how to make it work properly, or as well as it can, and not something that we want to look back on after it’s been a mess.

What I’m getting is decide early how you want to vote, and make sure your information is up to date. But one of the other points that you make in that guide is, be ready to pivot, have a plan B. Do your early thing, but if you get frustrated or thwarted, you can’t give up.

SR: Yes. In the spring, the intelligentsia of the election policy world basically said, “Oh! Everyone can just vote by mail, it’s not going to be a problem.” They didn’t realize that a lot of people, especially non-white people in metro areas, in urban areas, don’t want to vote by mail, because they want to cast it and see it taken and counted; they just don’t trust the system.

And in other places, the people just didn’t even talk about voting early. So what happened now is, there’s been a little bit of a recalibration. But really, what people should try to do is think of Election Day as the last resort.

So what happens is, like my parents in New York, when they did not get their ballots in time for the New York primary—what should they have done?

Well, my dad, he didn’t want to take the risk of going out, because he’s in his upper 80s. And that’s really sad. And other people might be in the same kind of situation. What do you do when your ballot doesn’t arrive when you order one?

Well, there are things to do, we can tell people about that later, but really, it involves showing up in person and having the right credentials. And that goes back to, “Hey, is your registration correct? Is the address correct? Did they spell your name properly? Did you have a middle initial on the form, or on your driver’s license? Does your signature look like it looks on your driver’s license?”

Because this is the kind of stuff, in states where Republicans are going to get very finicky, they’re going to use this to try to disqualify. Or they’re gonna yell and scream about this. And the only antidote for that is to have everything be really orderly. So that’s where we’re at.

JJ: Covid-19 was obviously a curveball; ham-fisted interference with the Postal Service another curveball of sorts. But then again, we need resilience and responsiveness built in to our systems.

So looking forward, once we get through this, if we can take the liberty to imagine that, what is suggested to you in terms of substantive improvements to the process?

SR: Everything that deletes unnecessary bureaucratic steps from the starting line to the finish line. And we could list a lot of those. I mean, come on, states like California, Nevada, Utah—Utah’s not exactly a blue state—are mailing everybody a ballot. They don’t have this ridiculous application process, which creates a ton of costs for printing, postage, a ton of manpower hours—it’s just unnecessary bureaucracy.

The same thing is true when it comes to people who don’t get their ballots in the mail, they show up at a polling place. They have the same technology in Los Angeles and Georgia; in Los Angeles, they will check you in and take you off the list getting mailed out ballots, and give you a regular ballot, and you’re off and you vote. In Georgia, they have to call the county election board to get permission to do that whole thing.

This is just intentional. There are so many things like this that just slow things down, and people leave…. It’s just, do you want to be an efficient, transparent process, where technology works well, and you have paper and digital technology backing each other up? Or do you want to create these ridiculous steps and procedures that really cause people to turn away?

These technicalities, they have political overtones and implications—and, you know, they’re not just technicalities.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld, the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, of the Independent Media Institute. You can find the voters guide we’ve been discussing through their site, IndependentMediaInstitute.org. It’s also online at NationalMemo.com.

Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin!

SR: Well, it’s really a pleasure, thank you!