Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

On biggest pandemic primary day, Pa. says riots are reason for absentee extension

Tuesday primaries

Philadelphians are navigating the coronavirus and the civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd to vote in the primary.

Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

Election officials already trying to navigate a health crisis are facing another challenge Tuesday: Conducting the most elections on a single day since the pandemic took hold three months ago, during a nationwide outbreak of protest against racial injustice.

The boldest response so far has come in Pennsylvania, one of eight states along with the District of Columbia holding primaries, where the governor is unilaterally postponing by a week the deadline for receiving absentee ballots in six populous counties.

Like most states, bellwether Pennsylvania usually counts only mailed ballots received by election day, and lawsuits seeking to force relaxation of those rules because of the coronavirus have not succeeded so far. But Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfe said Monday evening that the wave of demonstrations have made some deadline extensions essential.


"This is an unprecedented time for Pennsylvania and our nation as we face a major public health crisis and civil unrest during an election," he said in issuing an executive order hours before the polls opened. "Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy and I want to ensure that voters can cast their ballot and that it is received in time."

The order applies to the counties that encompass Philadelphia and its closest suburbs plus Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Erie — all places that have seen sometimes violent protests, clashes with police and looting in the week since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer who knelt on his neck.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The order notes the counties have been subjected to curfews and travel restrictions, making it difficult for people to return ballots, and that election offices in at least two counties have had to be evacuated. The six counties are all covered by a separate disaster declaration issued by Wolf in response to protests. His election order says ballots must be postmarked by the time the polls close but will be counted if they arrive by June 9.

His order drew immediate criticism from Republicans, who said the governor was acting outside his authority and violating the state and federal constitutions by changing election policies in only parts of the state. The counties are home to about two-fifths of the state's 12.8 million people.

Tuesday's elections also mark a major test for mailed-in balloting, which is likely to be a much larger portion of the ballots in the fall election. Typically, about one in four voters cast their ballots through the mail.

Democracy reformers will be watching the process on multiple fronts — whether the mailed ballots arrived in time to people's home addresses; how many are rejected by election officials for not having required signatures or other errors; and how long it takes to count the additional mail-in ballots.

Officials in all the places where the polls are open have promoted the use of absentee ballots — sometimes with rules changes, sometimes only with messaging — as a way to protect voters from exposure to the virus that causes Covid-19.

In some states, including Indiana, absentee ballot rules were temporarily changed to allow fear of the coronavirus as an acceptable reason for voting by mail.

In Pennsylvania, the elections are the first test of a package of reforms enacted last fall that eliminated the requirement that people say they had an allowable "excuse" — such as being out of town on Election Day — in order to claim an absentee ballot.

As a result, a record 1.8 million Pennsylvanians requested mail-in ballots.

The tabulation of the results from what's been dubbed the second Super Tuesday — eight presidential primaries, half of which had been postponed because of the pandemic — could allow former Vice President Joe Biden to formally clinch the Democratic nomination. He has been the presumptive nominee since early March, when he dominated the original Super Tuesday, but has not yet secured the 1,991 delegates to ensure mathematical victory and allow him to turn his full attention to the fall campaign.

One of the advantages, proponents argue, for mailed-in ballots is that they seem to be associated with higher turnout. Oregon, Washington and Colorado, which conduct their elections almost entirely through the mail, have among the highest turnout percentages of any state.

Opponents, led by President Trump, say allowing more people to vote by mail will lead to more voter fraud. This claim lacks any hard evidence.

But there are plenty of logistical obstacles that could potentially derail the expanded use of mail-in ballots, such as what happened in Wisconsin. There, mailed ballots did not arrive in time for thousands to use them to vote in April, among other problems.

Read More

Half-Baked Alaska

A photo of multiple checked boxes.

Getty Images / Thanakorn Lappattaranan

Half-Baked Alaska

This past year’s elections saw a number of state ballot initiatives of great national interest, which proposed the adoption of two “unusual” election systems for state and federal offices. Pairing open nonpartisan primaries with a general election using ranked choice voting, these reforms were rejected by the citizens of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The citizens of Alaska, however, who were the first to adopt this dual system in 2020, narrowly confirmed their choice after an attempt to repeal it in November.

Ranked choice voting, used in Alaska’s general elections, allows voters to rank their candidate choices on their ballot and then has multiple rounds of voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the final vote and is declared the winner. This more representative result is guaranteed because in each round the weakest candidate is dropped, and the votes of that candidate’s supporters automatically transfer to their next highest choice. Alaska thereby became the second state after Maine to use ranked choice voting for its state and federal elections, and both have had great success in their use.

Keep ReadingShow less
Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

The United States Supreme Court.

Getty Images / Rudy Sulgan

Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

Now, three minor political parties, who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The Peace and Freedom Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party have teamed up to file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their brief repeats the same argument that the courts have previously rejected—that the top-two system discriminates against parties and deprives voters of choice by not guaranteeing every party a place on the November ballot.

Keep ReadingShow less
Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

Someone filling out a ballot.

Getty Images / Hill Street Studios

Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

In the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S.

Keep ReadingShow less
Supreme Court
Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Gerrymandering and voting rights under review by Supreme Court again

On Dec. 13, The Fulcrum identified the worst examples of congressional gerrymandering currently in use.

In that news report, David Meyers wrote:

Keep ReadingShow less