Preserve a Level Playing Field

Attorney General William Barr made an important point in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in early September. The immediate topic at hand was widespread mail-in voting. But Barr’s larger point concerned the integrity of the American electoral system: “We are a closely divided country. People have to have confidence in the results of elections and the legitimacy of the government.” Anything that calls into question the fairness of elections, said Barr, is “reckless and dangerous”; it is “playing with fire.”

Just 20 years ago, a presidential election was decided by 537 votes out of 105 million cast. In 2016, the swing of just 70,000 votes — less than the number garnered by Green Party candidate Jill Stein — in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would have given Hillary Clinton victory in the Electoral College. And in two states — New Hampshire and Minnesota — Clinton’s winning margin was miniscule. Every vote counts.

Yet mail-in voting, on an unprecedented scale, risks skewing the voters’ choices. In New York congressional primaries in April, 84,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for failure to comply with one of the technical requirements, and nationwide 550,000 ballots were similarly discarded.

In addition, tens of thousands of ballots may not reach their intended address or arrive back to be counted. In Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County, which President Trump carried by 30 points in 2016, 60,000 ballots still had not reached voters, with less than a month to go until the election, due to the misfeasance of an independent contractor. Recently 100,000 Brooklyn residents received absentee ballots marked with incorrect names and addresses, which would render them invalid.