Primary shows KY should adopt mail-in voting permanently. You can help make that happen.
We don’t even know the results of Kentucky’s Tuesday’s election, but we do know this about our history-making pandemic primary:
1. Despite national cries of doom and gloom, it now turns out that we probably had a record number of people voting in a primary. That’s in large part due to the ease of widespread use of absentee ballots for the first time in Kentucky.
2. We really like mail-in ballots, given that it looks as though roughly 75 percent of those voting chose to use them.
So naturally, it’s time to think about what happens in November, and the answer is no one knows. The system used this time around — with two weeks early voting, no-excuse requested ballots and limited polling places — was set up in a compromise executive order by Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams allowed because the state was under a COVID-19 emergency order. It seems doubtful that COVID-19 will have disappeared by November.
Election law experts like Anna Whites said that despite election day hiccups, most of them in Lexington, the emergency plan went better than expected, and showed the public the benefit of mail-in voting.
“There was a real need, a real desire and it really increased turnout,” she said. Personally, “I loved the mail-in, I’m a huge fan.”
Gov. Beshear applauded Tuesday’s voting and said he hopes they can be replicated and improved in November. Even Adams, who campaigned against mail-in voting, is now a believer. Sort of. He still opposes mail-in voting of the kind practiced in other states, where everyone is automatically registered and sent a ballot. In Kentucky, people had to include their social security number to request a ballot, which also had bar codes on them.
His concern was about fraud, but, “yes, it was hard to cheat and easy to vote,” he said. “I’ll be the first to say it boosts turnout and that’s a good thing.”
The bigger concern is cost. Without knowing the final tally yet, he estimates it took roughly $12 million in federal funds to pay for the emergency system because postage is so expensive. In addition, the November election will probably have double the voters, so you need more ballots and postage and more more polling places in Lexington and Louisville. For a cash-strapped state government, it’s extremely expensive to operate a two-tiered system of both mail-in ballots and in-person voting. In other states, main-in voting has allowed communities to lessen the number of polling places, thus saving on cost.
Another silver lining to a pandemic primary, Adams said, is that the federal funds allowed nearly all the counties to switch back to paper ballots, which was one of his policy goals. After the debacle in the 2000 election with butterfly ballots, states were encouraged to buy electronic voting machines with difficult to use wheels, like the kind in Fayette County. But with concerns about hacking and confusion, people want to be able to scan and count paper ballots.
So paper ballots, the kind that can be sent through the mail, are here to stay. As the pandemic turns nearly everything upside down for the worse, why not adopt something that’s for the better? Eventually, of course, many hope this will lead to the ultimate ease: Voting by phone. “We bank by phone now, why couldn’t we vote?” Whites asked.
Some Republicans, like consultant Tres Watson, would like to see changes to our voting system with more relaxed absentee rules and longer voting hours. Kentucky’s voting hours of 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. are among the most regressive in the nation.
“There need to be more excuses provided,” he said. “If you’re wife is giving birth, she’s excused but you’re not.”
But he opposes expanding mail-in adopted in other states because they “don’t have history of voter fraud that we do,” he said. That’s true, but I’m not sure occasional cheating over a school board election in Clay County is enough to stop the access and ease of mail-in ballots.
Adams says he saved some money in case we’re still in a state of emergency in November. But any permanent changes will require approval by a Republican-led General Assembly. Those legislators may be listening to our current president, who despite voting by mail himself, keeps talking about how fraudulent it is.
“I think the odds are slim of this becoming the norm ... Trump’s comments are going to play a role in the General Assembly making this permanent,” said former Secretary of State Trey Grayson. “But when legislators start hearing, ‘this is really easy, I really want this’, that is key. Let your legislator know if you like this, especially if they’re a Republican.”
You heard the man. You know what to do.
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 9:27 AM.
