By Steven Rosenfeld

Across the country, as voting rights attorneys and election policy experts keep issuing increasingly detailed prescriptions on how 2020’s elections can continue in a pandemic, the civil servants who run elections are facing their version of a shortage of face masks and ventilators.

The first hints of a scramble over voting materials, machinery and manpower were behind-the-scenes actions following the seemingly simple decisions by ten states and territories to postpone primaries until June.

“Of course, there is nothing ‘straightforward’ about ‘simply’ postponing an election date,” noted Gavin Weise, election data manager for the U.S. Vote Foundation, which focuses on voting by Americans abroad. “All deadlines must be adjusted, materials reprinted with new dates, the workforce rescheduled, and facilities procured. In many cases, new resources are required as election administrators’ needs change — for example, to deal with the increased volume of mail ballots.”

The prospect of new multitudes voting by mail — starting with primaries (Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island), special elections (Maryland, California) or loosening eligibility for mail-in ballots (Alabama, West Virginia, Delaware, Connecticut, New York, Virginia) or extending mail-in periods (Iowa, Alaska, Wyoming) — has led county and state election administrators to speak of coming supply shortages.

“We have already contacted the vendor about leasing a high-speed scanner. Of course, everybody is [thinking about] doing that,” said Tammy Smith, Wilson County, Tennessee, assistant election administrator. “So, again, we get to the supply chain. Everyone is asking for the same thing all across the U.S. I’m concerned, are they going to be able to provide all of us with everything we need? If we can’t get high-speed scanners, then we need people.”

“I do have some pretty serious concerns about the supply chain,” said David Stafford, Escambia County, Florida, supervisor of elections. “I know a lot of people that are on this call have been participating in other calls. It’s not like these discussions have not already begun… Is there enough paper out there? Are there enough ballot envelopes to accommodate a massive expansion?”

Smith’s and Stafford’s remarks were from a March 25 e-briefing organized by Washington’s Bipartisan Policy Center to lay out the state of elections in the short term through the fall. Participants included state and local election administrators, foundation representatives, vendors, and congressional staff. Another speaker was Stephen Trout, the state elections director from Oregon, the first state to shift to voting by mail entirely.

“The challenge is going to be on the back end, where we have manual processes that have to happen. But I think the challenge that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about is the supply lines,” Trout said. “What’s your procurement process? For me, I still don’t have authorization to spend the federal funds that were granted in December [for cybersecurity] by my legislature yet. Then it will take me four-to-five months to be able to procure anything. Those are real things. People would have to procure central count vote tally systems, paper, [and] envelopes. There’s just a lot of logistics that would have to come into place — and that’s not even talking about the policies.”

The scramble for supplies goes beyond stocking in-person polling places and absentee ballot drop-off locations with “disinfectant, gloves and hand sanitizer, as well as additional pens for marking ballots,” as Weise noted.

“The other piece is, who is going to print the ballots? Are there going to be enough envelopes? Frankly, I told my counties two weeks ago, ‘There’s going to be more people voting by mail. You need to get on the phone to your vendor today, your envelope vendor, and make sure that you’ve got enough envelopes to get through November because there’s probably going to be a rush,’” Trout said. “Some voting systems require specific paper. Is there going to be enough?”

These nuts-and-bolts concerns are not what most experts in election policy circles ponder. They are not the focus of legislative debates and lawsuits by partisans, which usually concern the laws and regulations that govern how voters are credentialed, how their ballots are validated, and how their votes are counted or rejected. Those issues, typically called policy, are from the political arena, which is not the same as civil servants doing their jobs.

“I think the biggest challenge my counties are having right now is with the social distancing in their [counting] boards that are opening the envelopes that are verifying the signatures,” Trout said. “And so we are looking… at setting up some temporary locations, either adjacent to the county election office. I had suggested maybe high school gymnasiums because the schools are all closed, and then I found out that those were the backups for the hospitals.”

Other Simmering Issues

Matthew Weil, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s elections project director, said the webinar was to help election managers and policymakers move from the speculation around what needs to happen to specifics about the likely shift to more remote voting in 2020. The supply chain issues were genuine, he said, adding that they were not the only issues facing election officials.

“They are in competition with each other over a limited number of machines, ballots, envelopes, etc.,” Weil said by email after the briefing. “Re: printing stock. Again, from some election officials, it is the case that some of the high-speed scanners may need a certain stock of paper that is milled only by a few plants.”

“The procurement timeline for states is very long,” he continued. “When the initial HAVA [Help America Vote Act cyber] security grants were made available in March 2018, many in the public were surprised when election officials told them there would be little impact on the 2018 election. That includes members of Congress. But the reality is the government procurement processes are lengthy and usually involve soliciting multiple bids. Whether it can be faster under states of emergency, I don’t know.”

Another large area of unknowns were policy changes — state laws and administrative rules — that would govern the fine print of voting by mail. During the e-briefing, Trout listed many examples of decisions that affect how voters, their ballot envelopes, and their ballots would be processed.

“Ultimately, there’s a bunch of policy decisions that have to be made,” he said. “Are you going to notify people if their signature doesn’t check? What are you going to compare the signature against? Do you have signatures in your voter file now? If not, how are you going to get them? How are you going to authenticate those voters if the signature does not match? If you decide that you are going to notify people, how are you going to do that? How long is that going to take? Is that going to impact your supplies? Is that going to impact how soon you can get results out?”

“Those are all huge policy questions that are going to have to be decided if people are trying to move to a vote-by-mail process that never have” had one, Trout continued. “Those are big policy calls that are going to have to be made. This election [was already] contentious enough before we added all of this virus stuff to it. Any time you’re changing laws in the middle of a major election, that’s just fuel for lawsuits if results end up being close. You can’t just jump into this. We have to make sure that we do it right.”

Whether those policy questions will be addressed promptly by states is another open question because most legislatures have adjourned either temporarily or for the rest of the term, Weil said.

“Most could come back, though whether they will focus on election policy concerns over other pressing needs is unknown,” he said. “Some of the changes being made now are through executive orders [by governors] and authority given to governors by states of emergency. When those states of emergency are lifted, if before November, it’s not clear whether legislatures will endorse all of the executive’s actions for November. It varies by state.”

Beyond questions of whether policies will be updated, and whether there will be supply and personnel shortages — due to the need for additional poll workers to process a surge in absentee ballots — are still other concerns. Even if election policy changes were made, election workers would need training in new procedures.

The next sign of how states are adapting to this changing landscape will likely be in June when they will conduct their presidential primaries. States like Wisconsin, which does not have a history of widespread voting by mail, will see hundreds of thousands of ballots cast that way, Charles Stewart III, the co-founder of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, told the webinar.

“So we’re going to learn a lot over the next few weeks about the uptake among voters,” he said, adding that the big test will be next fall when a different electorate will turn out. “We need to remember that the new voters coming into the electorate in November will not be necessarily the ones who are voting in these primaries.”

Whether election managers will be able to accommodate these voters is an open question that cannot be answered now. The best that they may be able to do is proactively flag issues like supply shortages, policy gaps, and other emerging concerns, such as registering voters when state offices are closed. All these challenges are new and not occurring in a vacuum.

“Everybody is focused about how we are going to deal with the virus and all that, but the [cyber]security threat is still real. It may be more of a threat in the current environment,” Trout said. “My biggest concern as we entered 2020 was misinformation. I think that’s still my biggest concern. Given people concerned about how they’re going to get their ballot cast, questions about how vote by mail really works, I think that we are susceptible to even more disinformation…

“We all knew 2020 was going to be a crazy year, even before we had all the security and the pandemic to deal with.”

By Les Leopold

In early May, President Trump made public his fateful choice. He went all-in on reopening the economy even if it sends the virus death count into the millions. Actually, he made that choice long ago.

His logic was simple but cruel. Before the virus struck, his re-election hinged on taking credit for the robust economy he inherited. With unemployment at record lows, he hoped to hang onto just enough votes in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to again turn his 40 percent-plus, rock-solid base into an Electoral College majority. But Covid-19 undermined his rosy game plan by forcing a temporary economic lockdown, sending unemployment to Great Depression levels, and perhaps worse, almost instantaneously. Now the only option he sees is to let the death count soar while hoping the economy will rebound just enough so he can justify the carnage and claim credit for putting America back to work.

Trump played along with the carefully calibrated health policies put forth by Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci as long as he could tout the relatively low death projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). For weeks that model had predicted the death count would stall at around 50,000 to 60,000. As the number of deaths soared throughout April, anyone who could add and subtract knew the IHME projection was off — way off. Now the IHME model projects 135,000 deaths (with a potential range from 95,092 to 242,890) by the end of August, and this again is likely to err on the low side.

Before the IHME announced its recalculation, Trump’s advisors warned him that the number of deaths would climb much higher. As early as March 30th, Dr. Birx announced that she expected up to 200,000 deaths, “if we do things almost perfectly.” Knowing that the effort was going about as perfectly as his Ukrainian shakedown call, Trump basically gave up on the idea of a slow and careful reopening. On April 16th, he robotically read the Birx/Fauci step-by-step plan, which was supposed to be his plan to reopen the economy. Within hours he revealed his true intentions: He trashed his plan by tweeting his supporters to “liberate” blue state economies. Fourteen days of declining cases before a Phase 1 reopening? Screw that. Better to egg on the militias who were challenging Democratic governors with their assault weapons. Now some red states, followed by more red states, are ignoring the Birx/Fauci guidelines as they reopen willy-nilly. None of them have had fourteen days of declining cases.

But Trump also understands that the death count will hurt him politically as families all over the country experience first-hand that the virus is not a media hoax. So he must do what he loves to do — blame others. From the start, Trump downplayed the coming risks. He then passed the buck to the governors. It’s their job to stop the virus, he claimed. It’s the federal government’s job only to provide guidance and help governors find equipment and tests. “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the testing problems, he famously said on March 13th. He also feebly tried to shift the blame to the Obama administration for handing him “a broken system” for testing. But that ridiculous excuse crashed into the logic that 1) there was no test for Covid-19 during the Obama administration because there was no Covid-19, and 2) he’d been in office for three and a half years and had done nothing to fix what allegedly was broken. Two years before, he’d disbanded the office that was supposed to prepare for this exact situation.

The latest pass-the-buck mantra is to blame China for the entire debacle. He got Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to gin up a report that says Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. No matter that his intelligence agencies say that’s not the case. No matter that the intelligence agencies of our allies say that’s not the case. No matter that Dr. Fauci says the same.

As the election nears, Trump will proclaim again and again, “The Chinese did it, and I shut them down with a travel ban early on. That saved millions of lives.” And if the economy is slow to rebound, that’s China’s fault as well. It remains to be seen if China-bashing works as planned, but we should not be shocked by an “October surprise” in which U.S. warships provoke a confrontation in the China Sea to heighten the tension. Do any of us doubt that Trump is capable of moving us to the brink of war to win re-election?

Meanwhile, he’ll feed our hopes that increased testing and contact tracing (the responsibility of the governors, of course) will make going back to work feasible. He needs to get us to believe, at least for a few months, that we can safely return to our jobs (assuming they are still there) if we stay six feet apart, get our temperature checked at the door, and wash our hands repeatedly. Trump needs just enough of an economic bounce by November to help him slither through the piles of corpses.

All of this is justified by the well-traveled framework, which pits our livelihoods against our health. We hear again and again that it’s an inevitable trade-off — that to get our jobs back, we must accept more deaths. As Trump recently said, “There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.” Trump surrogate, Chris Christie, got more to the point by saying we just have to get used to the rise in deaths if we want to save “the American way of life.”

But is this “jobs versus health” trade-off inevitable? Are other democratic nations with sophisticated economies also slaughtering their people to reopen their economies?

As of this writing, the U.S. leads the world in Covid-19 deaths — by far — with nearly 75,000. The next highest are England and Italy, with about 30,000. But the more telling statistic is the per capita death rate, which takes into account population size differences. As of May 6th, we have suffered 2,260 deaths per 100,000 residents. But Trump’s mishandling of the crisis has killed far more than Canada (1,120), Germany (830), Denmark (870), Finland (450), Norway (400), Australia (40) and New Zealand (40). We should pay close attention to Germany, a global economic power that is now systematically opening its commerce, including museums and its premier soccer league. Yet it only has about one-third the per capita deaths as the U.S. So yes, it is possible to reopen a major economy in a democratic country without letting the death rate soar. Germany can more fully reopen its economy precisely because it has kept its death rate so low.

The horrific truth is that the uncoordinated, slipshod economic reopening spurred on by Trump and his minions is likely to double our per capita deaths before Election Day. At that point, we will lead the world in deaths per capita and the total number of Covid-19 deaths. He finally will have made America number one again.

We have to face up to the chilling truth: To win reelection Trump is willfully allowing the virus to kill more and more of us, especially our most vulnerable — the old, the infirm, the poor, and the essential low-wage workers.

It’s on us if we let him get away with it.

By Thom Hartmann

The coronavirus crisis is highlighting how dysfunctional states run by Republicans are. This is a feature of the GOP rule, not a bug.

For the past 40-plus years, a group of “conservative” billionaires has been working as hard as they can to reshape our federal government from one that provides education, healthcare, housing, food, and other necessities into one that does nothing more than run the military and fight wars.

It’s time to give them what they’ve worked so hard to get.

In the process, “blue states” can continue to flower and prosper, while “red states” go back to their pre-Civil War poverty and local oligarchies. All it’ll take is a small tweak to our federal system, something that the billionaires have been pushing for since the 1970s.

First, end the federal income tax, as David Koch called for when he ran for vice president in 1980. Most billionaires don’t pay much (if anything) into it anyway; as economists have documented and the New York Times (among others) reported, in 2019 billionaires paid a lower federal tax rate than anybody — including the working poor, the bottom 50 percent of American households.

The federal income tax has become a massive annual transfer of wealth from blue states to red states. Just let it go, so the states can raise their taxes to take care of their citizens without subsidizing other states.

“Taker” Mississippi, for example, gets about 40 percent of its total budget in federal funds taken from “maker” blue states, with fully 24 percent of its residents being fed via the federal food stamp program (compared to 10 percent of Californians). If they’re so gung-ho about “states’ rights” when it comes to denying citizens the right to vote,geting a safe abortion, or putting limits on carrying assault weapons, why not give them the “right” to pay for their social programs?

Education, housing, food stamps, healthcare, and almost every other program funded by the income tax (Social Security has its separate tax and fund) can be picked up by the states. Ending the federal income tax (and leaving the federal government with tariffs and fees to pay for the military, as we did from the founding of the republic up until World War I) would give the states lots of elbow room.

Take away the 30 percent or 40 percent (for the top income brackets; or, before Reagan, even 91 percent to 70 percent on a progressive sliding scale) federal tax rate, and the states can then raise their state income taxes to those levels. Blue states, no longer having to subsidize red states via the federal government, can easily pick up all the social safety net costs and have enough money left over to build a multi-state world-class coronavirus-resistant nonprofit hospital system.

To make things easier, the blue states need to enter into a compact like several New England and Mid-Atlantic states did to control greenhouse gases, a move emulated by California, Oregon, and Washington.

For a project this large, (mainly if it includes a single-payer healthcare system), it’ll take all of the blue states: an interstate compact including the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, the West Coast states, and the few remaining blue states in the Midwest like Illinois and Minnesota. And with their “pact” to decide when and how to open their states after the coronavirus crisis ends, numerous blue states have already laid the foundation for precisely this.

America’s wealthiest billionaires, including Walmart’s Walton family, the Kochs, and Jeff Bezos, have famously worked to gut the right of workers to form unions; fine, let them have their federal “right to work for less” law. But don’t forbid the blue states from enforcing union rights; they’re the key to the prosperous middle-class America had between the 1940s and Reagan’s election in 1980, and blue states are all about prosperity.

When the red states start to collapse or see a mass exodus of their people to blue states, let them join the compact but, as with the European Union, only if they agree to the terms of the Blue State Compact: higher taxes and fully funded health, education and welfare programs, as well as high-functioning infrastructure to support modern business activity.

Pick your metric: Livability, family-friendliness, quality of healthcare, quality and availability of education, “personal freedom,” economic strength, job growth, business climate, worker rights… in nearly every case, blue states outrank red states, and often by a considerable margin.

While the variation in GDP growth between the world’s top 20 economies averages around 1.75 percent, America’s blue states have grown 3.5 percent more than red states since the Great Recession. Blue states can take care of themselves.

As part of their interstate compact, blue states could even define their regulatory programs to keep their air and water clean and their food and drugs safe, as California has done for years with auto emissions. Without their taxes being sucked away to red states, the compact can afford to create its versions of the FDA, EPA, USDA, and OSHA.

Ending the federal income tax (or dialing it back to functional meaninglessness) and creating an interstate compact like this would require a few steps. Still, they’ve been followed numerous times in American history.

The federal income tax, authorized in 1913 by the 16th Amendment, has been raised and lowered repeatedly in more than 100 years since its inception. It’s been as low as a single-digit percent and as high as 91 percent. Given that the GOP has been begging for years to cut it as much as possible, if the Democrats in Congress were to offer to cut it to 1 percent or whatever minimum would, along with tariffs and fees, provide for the core functions of government (Army, Congress, SCOTUS, White House, etc.), it’s hard to imagine that the Republicans could say no.

Similarly, although Section 10 of Article I of the Constitution says, “No state shall, without the consent of Congress, … enter into any agreement or compact with another state,” that consent hasn’t been routinely withheld when interstate compacts were formed to do everything from controlling pollution to disposing of nuclear waste. This should be a viable idea.

Speaking to a group of 450 billionaires and multimillionaires, Charles Koch, in 2015, compared their struggle to that, according to the Washington Post, of “Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Not to mention George Washington.

“Look at the American Revolution,” Koch said, “the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement. All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”

A staple argument among America’s conservative uber-rich, going back to their reaction to Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s, has been that the federal government needs to stop interfering with states, and that federal regulations and subsidies are distorting markets and holding back “the magic of the free market.”

They tried their experiments with Chile and Russia, “libertarianizing” those nations’ economies, and the results were less than spectacular. Perhaps they can do better with the states they already control (via Charles Koch’s ALEC, for example) once those states are unencumbered by federal taxes, regulations, or the “stifling” effect of federal welfare and subsidy programs.

The right-wing billionaire definition of “freedom” includes the right to poverty, the right to die without healthcare, the right to be uneducated and illiterate, and the right to be hungry and homeless. Red states seem to like this since they repeatedly vote for it; we should let them have it.