Merrill: For Health Reasons Approve Vote By Mail

Secretary of The State Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s chief elections official, writes in a commentary for the Hartford Courant:

The legislature should immediately remove the restrictive language in the absentee ballot statute so that voters can request an absentee ballot simply due to “illness” for the June 2 primary. If the legislature doesn’t act, the governor should use his emergency powers to make this change. After all, anyone who is scared to visit a polling place for fear of spreading or contracting a deadly disease should not have to choose between their health and their right to vote.

Full commentary:

In Connecticut, we pride ourselves on ensuring that every citizen has the opportunity to make their voice heard, whether it be in town meetings, at the ballot box, or in referenda that many towns hold every year. Despite that legacy, we have fallen behind most states in one crucial area: making it easy for registered voters to actually cast their ballots.

Forty-one states allow their voters to mail in a ballot without a reason, vote early in a polling place or both. Five states conduct all of their elections by mail, and California, Pennsylvania and others are moving in that direction by allowing permanent mail-in voting status.

Connecticut stands with Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Rhode Island as the only states in the country that won’t let voters vote before Election Day and won’t let them vote by mail without an excuse. And of those states, we have the ignominious distinction of having the most restrictive absentee ballot laws in the country.

The argument for flexibility in voting methods isn’t that Connecticut is behind most other states, although we are, or that it would make it more convenient for voters to vote, although it would–the argument right now is that we are in a public health emergency, and our inflexibility is threatening our democracy.

The coronavirus has laid bare the weakness at the heart of our Election Day polling place-based system. Unlike almost everywhere else in America, our elections, instead of being run by counties, are run by the hard-working local election workers in each of our 169 towns. Thousands of poll workers staff almost 800 polling places in towns across the state. For years, Connecticut towns have struggled to find enough poll workers. Now, with an aging poll worker population and fear of a contagious and deadly virus, our towns are stretched to the breaking point.

I recommended to Gov. Ned Lamont and he issued executive orders that will delay Connecticut’s April 28 presidential primary until June 2. I have also asked him to use his emergency powers to remove the restrictive absentee ballot language in our statutes temporarily, so that more people are able to vote by mail when the primary is held.

These two measures would give us more time to prepare for what could be a large number of people who are either too ill to vote in person or who fear that they might be ill and don’t want to go to a polling place to vote.

States that have all mail voting, like Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Michigan, are prepared for this, and states that allow mail-in voting with automatically sent ballots, like California, have the capacity to get quickly up to speed. We do not.

But there are steps we can take to both shore up our capacity to hold the Presidential Preference Primary, now set for June 2, and to anticipate a significant increase in absentee ballots for future elections.

The legislature should immediately remove the restrictive language in the absentee ballot statute so that voters can request an absentee ballot simply due to “illness” for the June 2 primary. If the legislature doesn’t act, the governor should use his emergency powers to make this change. After all, anyone who is scared to visit a polling place for fear of spreading or contracting a deadly disease should not have to choose between their health and their right to vote.

But what if we are facing similar challenges in August? What if we see a fall resurgence

First, the legislature should immediately vote for a Constitutional Amendment, like the one I proposed in 2019, that removes the restrictive absentee voting language and provides for early voting, and do it with a super-majority so voters can decide on it this November. This would not solve the short-term problem but would give us the flexibility we now need to respond to new realities.

Second, anticipating a larger number of absentee ballots means we need a significant change to our voting infrastructure, including the use of new technologies and systems to accommodate new realities. There are proposals in Congress that have broad support to require the option of voting by mail for all Americans. This change would mean hiring additional people to open, sort and feed mailed in ballots into our tabulators, and to reconsider the number of polling places we currently require. We also would have additional physical needs. Some of our bigger towns will need space to collect and store, under lock and key, an unprecedented number of mailed ballots. My office will also need the resources to quickly develop an online mechanism to request an application for mail-in ballot. To pull this off by November, the legislature would have to allocate emergency funding.

Finally, we need to recognize that we are not just in a public health emergency but a democratic emergency. The coronavirus is affecting our ability to hire poll workers, locate polling places and gather together to elect our representatives the way we have in Connecticut for 200 years. It’s affecting our very ability hold an election.

Delaying the primary does not entirely solve the underlying problem. The November general election cannot be delayed, and it surely can’t be denied. We are on the precipice of disaster but, acting together, putting aside partisanship, we can ensure that every Connecticut voter is able to safely, conveniently and fairly cast their ballot and have it counted.