US election 2020: Millions of early voters set a record

More than 10 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the US presidential contest.

People stand in line in Atlanta, Georgia, on the first day of early voting for the US election. Picture: AFP

More than 10 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the US presidential contest, a tracking group said late on Tuesday (AEDT), a record pace three weeks before election day on November 3.

“Voters have cast a total of 10,296,180 ballots in the reporting states,” the US Elections Project of the University of Florida reported on its website.

The project said the early-vote count is multiple times higher than it was at the same point in 2016, ­fuelled by dramatic surges of mail-in voting because of health concerns about casting ballots in person during the coronavirus.

Nearly 75 million mail-in ballots have been sent or requested so far this year, more than double the 33 million in 2016, it said.

Early in-person voting began on Tuesday AEDT in a key battleground state, Georgia, although pictures of hours-long lines that went viral on social media led to accusations of “voter suppression”.

Booths set up for voting in State Farm Arena, Georgia's largest early voting location. Picture: AFP

The immense surge in demand for mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus is testing the country’s ability to pull off a credible election. Donald Trump says voting by mail is ripe for fraud and has promised to challenge ballot counts. “Out of control. A Rigged Election!!!” he tweeted on Friday after news that ballots with the wrong candidates were sent to 50,000 residents of Columbus, Ohio, a state he needs to win for re-election.

Despite hiccups, election analysts say so far the process is going well. “There’s going to be execution errors along the way,” said Kevin Kosar of the American Enterprise Institute. “The good news is, these mistakes are happening, but they are being caught early.”

But errors and delays in getting the ballots printed and mailed, cases of ballots being binned and reports of people receiving more than one ballot have stoked attacks on the concept at large.

Horror stories from the primaries earlier this year, particularly in New York and Wisconsin, support the concerns. In both states, tens of thousands of people either did not get their mail ballots or received them too late to vote. The postal service did not put postmarks on thousands of ballots to show they had been mailed on time.

Joe Biden replaces his face mask after speaking in the Cincinnati Museum Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio. Picture: AFP

Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the National Vote At Home Institute, said a few cases have blown up in the press and social media, but “are not widespread”. “It’s 2020 and everybody is highly sensitive,” she said.

The Ohio and New York ballot problems were printing and envelop insertion errors that could have been avoided with better management. “Is everything going to be perfect all the time? No. There never has been a perfect election,” Ms McReynolds said. “If we got two issues in two counties out of 8000 jurisdictions, then the bigger story is it’s working effectively in the majority of places.”

Ms McReynolds, former head of elections in Denver, Colorado, who helped set up the state’s universal by-mail voting system, said everyone is focused this year on mailed ballots, but in-person voting has its own problems, she argued, especially machine breakdowns and long lines, like those seen in Georgia on Monday, a particular issue given the COVID-19 pandemic. “I believe that there are actually more problems in in-person voting,” she said.

She said three states that could decide the winner — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — hadn’t given themselves enough time to open, verify and count millions of mailed ballots.

AFP

Donald Trump campaigns at Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Florida, on Tuesday. Picture: AFP