The coronavirus pandemic makes nationwide vote-by-mail a matter of life and death, and voters support it. Congresssional Republicans and Donald Trump, though, remain opposed, and Democrats haven’t yet forced the issue. But there is good news on the vote-by-mail front.
Local governments of heavily populated areas in at least two key states are sending vote-by-mail or absentee ballot request forms to every registered voter, allowing them to request ballots for November’s elections. Three counties that are home to more than one in four Florida voters—Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward—are sending out those vote-by-mail request forms, while the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is planning to do the same and include postage-paid return envelopes.
You may have noticed that those are areas of swing states with lots of Democrats, and that’s important. One possibility is that it becomes easier to vote in bluer areas of swing states, which would not be the worst outcome.
Another possibility, though, is that the actions of these county and city governments could put pressure on their state governments to do the same for all voters—send out ballot request forms so that everyone has equal access to mail voting. NBC News points out that’s what happened in Washington state in 2018, when King County, which includes Seattle, sent postage-paid envelopes to voters for mail voting. State election officials decided to extend that to every voter in the state so that everyone would be on equal footing. That would be a great outcome. (Maybe less of an electoral advantage for Democrats, but the right thing to do.) It’s a move toward the thing Congress should be doing for the whole country, which would be taking it one step past sending out ballot request forms and just plain sending out vote-by-mail ballots to everyone.
A third possibility is that where Republicans have control at the state level, they will move to prevent local and county governments from making it easier to vote by mail—blocking Democratic areas from doing right rather than doing right for everyone. But while that could work in Florida, Wisconsin now has a Democratic governor. So do other battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. So where Republicans can’t block heavily populated areas with lots of Democratic voters from making vote-by-mail easier (though still not as easy as it should be), they will have an incentive to extend the same courtesy to areas with lots of Republican voters.