Kerby Anderson

My commentary yesterday raised the question of whether we would be able to declare a winner in the presidential contest even a week after November 3. If the election isn’t close, then we don’t have to consider those concerns. But the polls in a number of states suggest the election is too close to call.

Ari Fleischer served as press secretary for President George W. Bush. He says, “As a survivor of the 2000 recount, I do not want anyone to go through what happened to George Bush or Al Gore.” He believes this election will test our ability to accurately decide a presidential election without controversy surrounding it.

It is likely that the 2020 election will break all records for turnout. That, he says, is inspired by both love and hate of President Trump. Turnout may exceed 150 million votes. And it is possible that the push for mail-in ballots will drive the number higher.

In the 2016 election, only about 33 million absentee ballots were cast, and less than one percent were rejected. That still amounted to 318,728 ballots that were rejected. In Florida, 21,973 were rejected. In Pennsylvania, 17,574 were rejected. The totals were similar in a number of other swing states.

Even apart from potential fraud is the problem of properly counting mail-in ballots. In the New York Democratic primary that I mentioned yesterday, 25 percent of those absentee ballots were rejected.

Ari Fleischer reminds us that the problem of mail-in ballots is compounded by states that have not previously engaged in widespread mail-in voting. Washington state, for example, has a long history of mail-in voting. But it took years to get their process right and was not conducted in the middle of a pandemic.

States without such experience should not try this risky experiment of mail-in voting, especially if we believe this election will be close.