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Election officials need to be prepared for the worst, report says

Voting amid a pandemic

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice offers a "how to" for officials conducting an election in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Our Staff
By Our StaffJun 09, 2020
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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Election officials have begun raising the alarm about the additional costs and pitfalls associated with a huge increase in the numbers of people voting by mail this fall.

Now the Brennan Center for Justice is offering guidelines for how to deal with the cybersecurity and technical challenges of putting on an election that is mainly by mail in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

The new report deals with every aspect of the election, from advance preparations all the way through reporting the results to the public.

It calls for making sure proper cybersecurity practices are in place to deal with the many election office employees and vendors who are working on computers from home. People connecting to the voter registration database from their home computers, for example, need to take extra care in order to avoid hacking.

The report, posted Friday, calls on election officials to plan now for how to respond to failures in voter registration systems, the systems for requesting and returning absentee ballots, and breakdowns of electronic poll books and voting machines at in-person voting sites.

Having a communication strategy in place to let the public know what is going on and when to expect election results is also critical, the report states.

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People voting

Jessie Harris (left,) a registered independent, casts a ballot at during South Carolina's Republican primary on Feb. 24.

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Our election system is failing independent voters

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and co-founder of Let Us Vote.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

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The ballot used in Alaska's 2022 special election.

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The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.

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Make safe states matter

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It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

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Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

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