A nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization, the National Vote at Home Institute is dedicated to ensuring the security of our elections and putting voters' needs first. Vote at home is a growing trend across red, blue and purple states because it is a time-tested and proven way to bolster the security of elections, improve voter engagement, and reduce election-related costs.
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Election Day is coming. There's no time like the present to make sure you're all set to participate.
Leadership Now and its partners are recruiting poll workers through corporate and university networks to address the shortage caused by Covid-19.
Petrow-Cohen and Deal are on the staff of the Leadership Now Project, a membership group of mostly business leaders that invests in nonprofits and candidates that "advance a modern, effective democracy."
Kentucky hailed as a success its decision to use some large facilities as voting super centers for the June primary, including the convention center in Louisville.
More than a dozen professional teams are interested in allowing their arenas to be voting centers this fall — adding to the growing list of ways civic engagement has taken new forms during the pandemic.
The stadiums, which can hold tens of thousands of fans, have sat mostly empty since the Covid-19 outbreak brought pro sports to a halt five months ago. In November, though, they could provide enough room for poll workers to space out a large number of ballot stations and socially distance voters while reducing wait times.
The initiative comes as election officials across the country try to make in-person voting safe and mail-in voting accessible while President Trump continues to cast doubt on the security of what could be a majority vote-by-mail election.
Absentee voting refers to when a voter requests a ballot for an election and is then sent one in the mail. Vote-by-mail, which is what Sen. Tom Cotton is most likely referring to as "mass mail-in voting," is a system of sending every registered voter (an important distinction from "everyone") a ballot without a request. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Colorado, Hawaii, Utah, Washington and Oregon were already vote-by-mail states. But now California, Nevada and Vermont will also automatically send ballots to registered voters, while still having in-person options.
Vote-by-mail states send the ballot to the address on file in the voter registration database; the address was verified during the registration process. For example, in Colorado the ballot will be "sent to the mailing address you provided for your voter registration file." It's the voters' responsibility to update their address if they move.
These vote-by-mail states usually have the cleanest voter files because they interact with voters so regularly, according to Audrey Kline, the national policy director at the National Vote at Home Institute. Even if a ballot gets sent to the wrong address, it's most likely due to voter inaction rather than fraud.
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"It's not like my ballot is going to end up in another city randomly," she wrote in an email. "Errors usually center around people not updating their voter registration before a ballot is mailed. So if you move and don't tell your clerk, you ballot could arrive at your old address. This in and of itself isn't usually a huge issue — they are non-forwardable and get sent back to the clerk." If someone does gets the wrong ballot mailed to them and then tries to impersonate that voter, that fraud is detectable by signature matching and other security policies.
"The fact is that mail ballot fraud on the scale that people are warning of is just not practical or economical," Kline said. "People say 'ripe for fraud' because nobody has figured out how to do it on a large scale, but they think it's still possible and are trying to keep the argument alive."
