Remember election night? Pandemic, tight races could make it election week. Or longer
Kansans and Missourians may need to be patient on election night Tuesday. That’s because election night won’t necessarily bring election results.
The unprecedented volume of mail balloting and a shortage of poll workers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with tightly-contested primary races, creates the conditions for a long election night, or possibly election week. Or longer.
Officials in Kansas, where Republican voters will select a general election contender for the seat of retiring Sen. Pat Roberts, are explicitly cautioning against expecting reliable results Tuesday night. Missouri, which will decide whether to become the 38th state to expand eligibility for Medicaid, is more optimistic about a timely outcome.
Tuesday could also be a preview of November 3, when all 50 states and the District of Columbia will be running elections in a pandemic.
Many states have seen long lines for voting this primary season, as a shortage of poll workers has slowed in-person voting. Other states have embraced mail voting as a safer alternative during the pandemic to ensure as many people get to vote as possible.
Both factors could contribute to delays in final results. But waiting isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the reason is a high volume of mail ballots. Election experts say a slower process can ensure accuracy and that each lawful vote gets counted.
“Like a fine wine, an accurate and fair count of ballots takes time. It takes longer to process absentee ballots to ensure their security. So voters need to have patience,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
“They also may need extra patience voting in person. In other state primaries during the pandemic, we saw long lines and polling place closures, much of it related to the virus,” he said.
Wisconsin’s health department confirmed a month after its April primary that at least 71 people contracted COVID-19 after either voting or serving as poll workers— though it could not say for certain they caught it at the polls—according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Kentucky and New York experienced long lines and delayed results when they held their primaries in June.
Kansas, Missouri prepare for pandemic election
Election officials in several Kansas counties, including the two most populous, Johnson and Sedgwick, have been encouraging voters for months to use mail ballots.
As of July 31, nearly 315,000 have been sent to voters across the state, six times more than at this point in 2016 or 2018.
Roughly half of those ballots have already been returned. But Kansas election offices are required by law to count all mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received within three days. That means ballots received by 5 p.m. on Friday August 7 will count.
The high number of outstanding mail ballots and the competitiveness of the top-level races has Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s office cautioning citizens and the media not to treat Tuesday night’s results as final.
“We are being more proactive in reminding folks that on Election Day, it’s always unofficial, in part because we’re expecting several really close races and also because we’ve sent out about 310,000 advanced by-mail ballots,” said Katie Koupal, Schwab’s spokeswoman.
“And the reality is we will be getting more in on Election Day and three days following and so those closer races that you see will likely fluctuate greater than what they have before just because of the numbers of advanced by-mail ballots.”
Koupal said the media and campaigns are welcome to declare winners on election night, but the office’s responsibility is to make sure that all ballots that should be counted are counted.
While Schwab’s office is cautioning against taking the Tuesday night results at face value, his Missouri counterpart is optimistic that Tuesday results will be pretty close to the final.
“We’ve been in contact with our largest election authorities in terms of absentee and mail-in ballots requested,” said Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft. “We’ve gone through talking to the six top jurisdictions and all of them feel confident that they will be able to report absentee and mail-in ballots at the normal time.”
Ashcroft’s office said that there have been more than 200,000 absentee and mail-in ballot requests across the state.
Kansas has allowed voters to vote by mail for any reason since 1996. Missouri has been more restrictive in the past, but this year is allowing any eligible voter to use the mail.
However, unless they fall into certain categories, including being immunocompromised, Missouri voters will have to take the extra step of getting their mail ballot notarized.
Ashcroft said mail ballots must arrive by 7 p.m. on election night to be counted, with the exception of overseas military ballots. That puts Missouri voters on a much tighter timeline for return of their ballots than Kansans.
Ashcroft said he is not a fan of mail voting and still considers voting in person to be the gold standard. While he’s hopeful the state will avoid long lines because many election offices have used federal coronavirus aid to increase poll worker pay, his office won’t begin reporting results until everyone has finished voting.
“I made the decision that we won’t release any results until all polls are closed. I don’t want to do anything to make anyone think their vote doesn’t matter,” Ashcroft said.
Both Schwab and Ashcroft are encouraging county election offices to begin processing mail ballots they’ve received ahead of August 4. They won’t be able to count them until polls close, but they can check signatures and process the ballots ahead of Tuesday.
The first results that post Tuesday in Kansas will be the already-processed mail ballots and the advance ballots cast in person—nearly 31,000 as of Friday morning.
Slow and steady
The record-setting rate of mail voting in the region comes as President Donald Trump continues to make baseless claims that it will lead to voter fraud in November.
Trump even suggested Thursday that the November election should be delayed, an idea that would require an act by Congress, which is unlikely. Later that day, Trump tied his objection to mail voting to concerns about the speed of determining winners.
“Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” Trump said on Twitter.
While waiting for mail ballots may cause delays in determining a winner and tip the balance in close races, Kansans shouldn’t see that as a problem, said Bob Beatty, the chair of political science at Washburn University in Topeka.
Slower is often better when it comes to ensuring accuracy of vote counts, said Beatty, an election observer with the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia during that country’s 2012 presidential election. He has worked in multiple countries since then as an international observer.
“I’ve been in Mongolia, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom to observe elections and they actually count by hand,” said Beatty, who described how election workers go through each ballot by hand as representatives from competing parties stand behind them.
“It makes it a slow process, so usually they get the results the next day— especially if it’s a close election because they have to do recounts. And people come to expect it culturally,” Beatty said. “What we’ve come to in the United States is we’ve come to expect results to be immediate even when they shouldn’t be.”
Kansans have some experience in waiting for election results.
Two years ago, technical problems in Johnson County meant they went to bed on primary night unsure of who had won the Republican primary for governor or the Democratic primary to challenge Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder.
When machines started working the following morning, Sharice Davids emerged as the Democratic nominee in the Kansas 3rd Congressional District, but the GOP primary race for governor was still too close to call with a razor thin margin separating then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and then-Gov. Jeff Colyer.
The Colyer-Kobach contest— the closest GOP gubernatorial primary in U.S. history—came down to provisional ballots, which are uncounted on Election Day for a variety of reasons, ranging from the person showing up at the wrong polling place to a signature not matching what’s in the voter file.
County officials assess them afterward to determine which ones should count, and for which races, and which ones should be thrown out.
Beatty said the state could be in store for a similar scenario this year with a competitive U.S. Senate race — pitting Kobach against Rep. Roger Marshall in the primary—and tough GOP primary fights in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts.
“I certainly would be prepared to have up to three races in Kansas where it’s too close to call,” he said. “People need to be patient— the media too— especially people on television.”
Kobach, who led Trump’s disbanded voter commission, has long used the specter of voter fraud as a political cudgel—despite limited evidence of its prevalence in Kansas. This could intensify passions if the Senate primary is too close to call Wednesday morning.
And it could be just a preview to the political wrangling in November if results are close in the presidential race.
Walter Shapiro, a fellow for the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, urged the media to be cautious in its framing of results on election night in November because the final counts in key states may not be determined for weeks.
“Unless the 2020 presidential election is a blowout, the pandemic will likely play havoc with our election night rituals. The explosive growth of absentee ballots and their slow count will mean days or weeks of uncertainty if the election is as close as 2016, when six states (Michigan, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Minnesota) were decided by less than 2 percentage points,” Shapiro said in a post on the legal think tank’s website last month.
“Long lines, malfunctioning machines, and attempts at voter suppression are also apt to add to the controversy and confusion of a Covid-19 election.”
This story was originally published August 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Remember election night? Pandemic, tight races could make it election week. Or longer."
