Ballot drop boxes are last field round in the American election campaign

(Reuters) – Welcome to the latest partisan ballot in the US presidential election: the ballot box.

While U.S. election officials have called for a dramatic expansion of voting by mail in the Nov. 3 election, Democrats across the country are promoting dropboxes as an easy and reliable option for voters who do not want to vote for the U.S. Postal Service. .

President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has meanwhile accused her of using them in Pennsylvania, a major battlefield state, claiming the coffers could trigger vote-rigging.

Republican officials in other states have prevented the use. Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett told the U.S. Senate in July that dropboxes could enable people to pass a state law against collecting ballots.

In Missouri, Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft decided not to distribute 80 dropboxes he had purchased because state law requires that these ballots be returned by mail.

“We did not want to confuse voters,” said spokeswoman Maura Browning.

Dropboxes have adopted new urgency after austerity measures at the U.S. Postal Service have slowly delayed national mail delivery and Trump has repeatedly attacked the legitimacy of postballots. Polls let Republican President pursue Democratic challenger Joe Biden in a race that some experts say could see half of all absent votes.

Some say the dropbox battle is a lot of thought about a piece of citizen furniture – typically a highly constructed metal box placed in a public location, often controlled by video.

In Connecticut, Secretary of State Denise Merrill is urging voters to return their ballots by dropbox instead of by mail in the run-up to the November election, after receiving reports that some voters sent in a week before the state’s late August 11 nomination contest. arrived to be counted.

Three-quarters of the votes in that August primary were absent, she said, up from about 4% in previous years. Merrill, a Democrat, said the state had proven 200 newly installed dropboxes a safe and popular option.

“I do not understand why people think they are such a problem,” Merrill said. “They are safer than mailboxes.”

Republicans in Pennsylvania do not share that sentiment. Trump won that competitive state by less than 1 percentage point in 2016. Winning there again could prove very much in his quest to secure a second term in office.

The Trump campaign is a case of forcing the state to pull out all the dropboxes used in the primary June. It claims that people could drop multiple votes in boxes that are unstaffed, which is an illegal practice in Pennsylvania. State officials “have exponentially improved the threat that fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate votes will be cast and counted,” the lawsuit states.

The Trump campaign said in a statement filed Saturday that it had complied with a judge’s order to provide evidence of alleged fraud to the suspects. That evidence has not been made public. Trump’s lawyers did not respond to a request from Reuters to view it.

Bruce Marks, a former Republican state senator in Pennsylvania, said dropboxes do not provide a clear chain of command for the ballot papers that have been dropped inside.

“There is no one who sees or follows,” he said.

Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Pennsylvania Republicans are moving drop boxes because Democrats have had far more success this year in signing their voters this year for emails larger than a two-to-up margin, said Brendan Welch, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

“(Republicans) know the easier it is for everyday people to vote, the more likely they are to lose,” Welch said. “Maybe they should expend their energy to try to fit in with the Pennsylvania Democrats’ organization in Pennsylvania in Keystone State.”

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has defended Pennsylvania’s use of dropboxes, claiming they are legal and essential, especially in the age of coronavirus.

One BOX, 864,000 VOTERS

In neighboring Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose said last week that he did not want to risk a similar lawsuit because he announced he would authorize one dropbox for each of the state’s 88 counties. He said the Republican-controlled legislature had not given him the authority to provide more.

Democrats pushed LaRose to reconsider his decision, pointing out that it left the 864,000 registered voters of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, a Democratic stronghold, with the same number of dropboxes as the 8,400 registered Vinton County voters.

“You can not have a one-size-fits-all approach with our counties,” said Kathleen Clyde, a senior advisor for the Biden campaign in Ohio. “One dropbox does not cut it.”

LaRose, meanwhile, is trying to secure prepaid mail for emails, said spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan, “effectively making each mailbox its own dropbox.”

Michigan, another battlefield state, has added dropboxes this year.

Wisconsin’s five largest cities, including Milwaukee, are setting up dropboxes as part of a secure voting plan funded by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group.

In hotly contested Florida, Democrats in Miami-Dade County, the largest in the state, are trying to remove some procedural barriers to make it easier for voters to use dropboxes.

Unlike other counties in the state, Miami-Dade voters must provide election officials with a valid identification when dropping a vote at a dropbox. Election workers also record a 14-digit number printed on the voter’s envelope in a log.

The entire process could take up to three minutes, the Democratic Party said in a letter to local election officials trying to allow voters to cast their ballots quickly without the processing requirements.

“Trump has deliberately sabotaged the post office and we must therefore find ways. We think facilitating a dropbox and avoiding the post office is part of the solution, “said Steve Simeonidis, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party.

The White House has said Trump never told the Postal Service to change its operations.

NET TENSE EVERYTHING

Security measures required for ballot boxes vary by state. In Montana, these holdings must be staffed by at least two election officials, while in New Mexico they must be monitored by video, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

By 2020, eight states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington – had laws detailing how and where drop boxes could be used.

Votes returned in this way proved popular: In Colorado, Oregon and Washington, more than half of e-mail votes were returned either to a dropbox or to an election office in the 2016 presidential election, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dropboxes were not controversial in these states.

“Both parties use it at a very high rate, so many of these tensions do not exist here,” said Murphy Bannerman of Election Protection Arizona, a non-partisan voting group.