Democratic politicians and groups are beginning to push voters to vote in person or hand deliver their absentee ballots as concerns grow over what a flood of mail-in ballots may mean for the election.
Democrats are more likely to vote absentee or mail-in historically than Republicans, and that difference has been amplified this year with the outbreak of the coronavirus as well as a Democratic legal push to loosen voting laws in a number of states, including many swing states.
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is running for Senate against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, as well as Democratic candidate for Senate in Idaho Paulette Jordan, are both encouraging voters to turn in their mail-in ballots in person. A number of Democratic-aligned organizations have shifted their messaging to include or primarily push in-person voting, according to Axios.
Black PAC and The Collective PAC have both shifted voter outreach strategies to encourage more in-person voting rather than mailing of ballots.
“We’re shifting away from making plans to vote by mail to voting early in person,” The Collective PAC founder Quentin James told Axios.
Voting by mail has become increasingly risky this year due to a high demand for absentee and mail-in ballots. During presidential primaries alone this year, hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by mail were lost, effectively disenfranchising over half a million voters.
As NPR reported on Aug. 22:
An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year’s presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR.
That’s far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.
A flood of mail-in ballots has caused primary election problems in states such as New Jersey and Wisconsin. In New Jersey, election officials found roughly 1,600 primary ballots stuffed in a bin and uncounted months after the July primary.
As The Daily Wire reported:
The votes were reportedly placed in a “mislabeled” bin in a “secure area” of the county election office, according to the New Jersey Herald. Sussex County Board of Elections Administrator Marge McCabe maintained that the 1,666 extra votes did not change the outcome of the July 7 primary race. “The Board of Elections is confident that all ballots received have been processed and the security of all the ballots has remained in place,” she said.
In Wisconsin, problems hit almost every level of the mail-in voting process, from requests for ballots not being processed to voters’ ballots not getting to the proper election officials to be counted.
Democrats have put a heavy emphasis on mail-in voting and one Democratic data firm has predicted a “red mirage” outcome in the presidential election where President Trump appears to win on election night, only to slowly lose ground and eventually be defeated by Democratic candidate Joe Biden as mailed ballots are processed.