By: Elizabeth West
On November 3, millions of Americans cast their vote for the next President of the United States. This was an election like no other: a presidential race that was already historic was conducted under the cloud of a global pandemic. Concerns about the Coronavirus prompted states to reassess voting procedures ahead of the 2020 presidential election. These changes prompted backlash and sparked lawsuits in the weeks and months leading up to the election. On Saturday, four days after the polls closed, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were announced as President and Vice President-Elect of the United States. Their victory was announced after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Biden, pushing the former Vice President past the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the Presidency.
While in-person voting was still available to voters across the country, many states enacted precautions to minimize the risk to voters and poll workers. Heavier voter turnout was predicted this year: in fact, two-thirds of those eligible to vote participated, which is the highest turnout rate since 1900. This meant long lines at many polling stations, despite the record-breaking 65 million votes that were cast by mail. For those voters who cast their vote in person, there were “requirements that voters line up six feet apart,” with “extra space between voting machines, plastic shields protecting poll workers, and lots of hand sanitizer.”
In light of the pandemic, states expanded voter eligibility to vote-by-mail. Many, including Massachusetts, have long offered mail-in voting for specific groups of voters. Prior to 2020, five states offered a mail-in-voting option to all voters – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. In light of the current pandemic, many states enacted laws expanding voter eligibility for mail-in ballots. For example, in Massachusetts, Governor Charlie Baker signed a law that extended this option to all state voters for both the September primaries and the November general election. The law also provided that the Secretary of the Commonwealth mail the application for mail-in ballots to every one of Massachusetts’ 4.5 million registered voters.
While the expansion of voting by mail across the country was “primarily meant to allow people to vote safely from their homes,” and help reduce crowding at many polling locations, many expressed concerns about voting by mail. Even President Trump expressed his mistrust of mail-in ballots, stating to his supporters at an October 25 rally in Londonderry, New Hampshire that “the biggest risk we have are the fake ballots.” While there were several newsworthy incidents of what amounts to ballot tampering in the weeks leading up to the election, experts say that widespread electoral fraud does not exist in the United States. On October 25, the same day President Trump commented on the threat of fake ballots, a ballot box was set on fire outside the Boston Public Library.
President Trump has continued to make these largely unfounded claims in the days since the election, claiming in a press briefing on November 5, “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking to them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late.” Though the President is suggesting that votes are “illegal” if they arrive after the election, late postal ballots postmarked by Election Day can be counted in around half of US states. This is the case in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina, where ballot counting continued in the days after the election.
President Trump also said late postal ballots in Pennsylvania were being counted “without even postmarks or any identification whatsoever,” despite the state’s Supreme Court ruling that late ballots with missing or illegible postmarks would be counted unless sufficient evidence “demonstrates that it was mailed after election day.” Each postal ballot goes through several steps, such as signature and address checks, in order to be verified.
There were also technical difficulties with the implementation of vote-by-mail procedures in many states. For example, in some state primary elections, postal delays caused some ballots to arrive late, making it more challenging, or impossible, for people to vote. Counting mail-in votes took longer than if they had been cast on a polling machine. In many states – including key battleground states like Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – state law prohibited election officials from beginning to count the votes until Election Day. Concerns about votes getting rejected or lost in the mail (or even burned, as the case may be if you deposited your ballot outside the Boston Public Library) prompted many states to allow voters to track their ballots online.
In addition to vote-by-mail ballots, the option of absentee ballots still existed for voters. In Massachusetts, for example, though all registered voters had the option to vote-by-mail in this election, any voter in the military, residing oversees, incarcerated, in need of a family member to apply on their behalf, or who had been admitted to the hospital or quarantined within one week of the election was eligible for an absentee ballot.
Some of these changes to state voting laws sparked fierce debates and even lawsuits. After the North Carolina State Board of Elections (“NC Board”) announced that they would accept absentee ballots until November 12, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, state Republican legislative leaders and President Trump’s campaign petitioned the United States Supreme Court to force the NC Board to return to its previous rule, which only allowed for a three-day acceptance window for such ballots. In Pennsylvania, the state’s highest court issued rulings in September that “extended the deadline for mail ballots to be returned, ruled that voters can use drop boxes to return them, and removed the Green Party’s presidential ticket from the ballot.”
Since election day, the Trump campaign has filed roughly a dozen lawsuits, most aimed at disqualifying or blocking ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada. Most of these lawsuits have been dismissed on lack of merit, and none are likely to change the outcome of the Presidential race.
Despite the increased time it took to count the influx of mail-in ballots, ongoing legal battles, and concerns over safety, security, and potential voter fraud we now officially have a President-Elect and Vice President-Elect.
Student Bio: Elizabeth West is a second-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. She is a staffer on the Journal of High Technology Law. Elizabeth graduated summa cum laude from The University of Massachusetts Boston with a degree in History.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
