Talking Early Voting With Bob

For weeks we Americans have had more fraught conversations over voting, and specifically absentee voting (or vote by mail) since debates on the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

President Donald Trump says absentee voting is fraud (actually, he says vote by mail will lead to fraud, either way). While Democrats, and other supporters, say in a pandemic voters have to vote safely, so absentee voting should be expanded. And while Mr. Trump excoriates absentee voting Republicans are encouraging people to get their absentee ballots. Lordy, lordy.

Naturally, this reporter decided to talk to his old college roommate Bob Evnen on the topic.

You don’t know Bob? You should. Bob has gone from the long-haired studious -- except when we were partying (which we did...often) -- feller who shared a Cedar Village apartment during our days at Michigan State University, to be Robert Evnen, an upright Republican attorney in his native Lincoln and elected by the good people of Nebraska in 2018 as secretary of state. He done real good. (For the record, Bob still has hair. This reporter remembers hair.)

Nebraska has had no-reason absentee voting for many years, though there it is called no excuse early voting. Michigan is a mewling baby to the world of no reason AV compared to Nebraska. For the record, before Covid-19 struck, 34 states, along with the District of Columbia, had no reason AV. That list is bigger now. Five states -- Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington -- run their elections completely by mail.

Secretary Evnen, I guess I should call him that, didn’t know off the top of his head when Nebraska switched to no-excuse voting, but when it required an excuse to vote absentee the future secretary of state was studying in England. He requested a ballot for the 1972 election, found a solicitor who verified his identity, witnessed his signature, attested to same and sent off the ballot. Bob, sorry, Mr. Evnen then paid her a few pounds for her troubles.

Interestingly, that election set the Nebraska record for voter turnout until this past May’s primary election. In 1972, 412,000 voters in the Cornhusker state voted out of fewer than 800,000 registered voters. This past May, 487,000 people voted in the primary, out of 1.2 million registered voters. While the turnout was higher this past May, the percentage of voters voting was far higher in 1972.

“You can make voting as easy as getting a lottery ticket, it doesn’t improve the outcome,” Mr. Evnen said. Election turnout has declined for years in the U.S., what does he think is needed to improve turnout? It requires, Mr. Evnen said, people “feeling I have a stake in this country,” and building that feeling depends much on education.

There is another major difference between the May 2020 and the 1972 election: the percentage who voted no excuse early voting, he said. This past May, 75 percent of the votes were cast by early voting and 25 percent at the polls. In 1972, the percentages were reversed.

If most voters will vote absentee from now on, Mr. Evnen said steps are needed to protect the security of the elections. 

He did not say, as a certain president of the United States has done repeatedly, that early voting will loose a fraudulent tide.

Mr. Evnen did say care was needed because, “these are high stake elections. The federal government spends trillions of dollars, the states, Nebraska, spends billions. A small number of people control huge pots of money. There is a high degree of motivation in a number of people to exploit weaknesses in the system. I don’t want to wait until the system has been exploited before we do something.”

Voting in person provides a greater sense of control, Mr. Evnen said, because the voter appears, the voter is verified, issued a ballot, marks the ballot in confidence, places the ballot in a protective sleeve and then feeds the ballot into a tabulator. That’s how the system works in Nebraska, though there is no legal requirement for a paper backup, and it is essentially the same in Michigan, where a paper backup is required. Each state controls its own voting system and most have some form of paper backup (the National Conference of State Legislatures is, by the way, an excellent source for tracking voting and ballot requirements).

Early voting is by nature less secure, he said, because while a voter has to sign the ballot -- and that signature is checked against an exemplar -- it is impossible to determine if anyone influenced or “helped” the voter in filling the ballot. One also has to take care how the ballot is cast, especially against “ballot harvesting.”

Ballot harvesting is illegal essentially everywhere, but it has occurred. A scandal broke in 2018 in North Carolina where a Republican congressional candidate led a ballot harvesting effort.

Part of Mr. Evnen’s concerns swirl around Nebraska’s requirements. For example, the state does not require voter ID (technically not required in Michigan, but which essentially most voters follow). And Nebraska’s law on sending an early vote ballot is more open to interpretation.

In Nebraska a voter can appoint an agent to mail or deposit the ballot. A campaign worker is not permitted to deposit the ballot for the voter, unless he or she is a member of the voter’s family. It is possible, though, to see how under Nebraska law a wink-wink-nudge-nudge setup could occur where ballots are collected by agents but then altered or disappear.

In Michigan the voter has to send or deposit the ballot, but a family member or someone living in the voter’s house can handle that action.  

There are other issues Mr. Evnen worries about, such ensuring voting records are correct and names taken off when a voter moves out of district or dies. He wants Nebraska to join ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, where 30 states share data on changes in voter registrations.. Michigan is a member of ERIC.

He will ask the Nebraska legislature in 2021 to make a series of changes (the legislature has already adjourned for 2020) in its election laws.

So far as Mr. Evnen knows there have been no issues with early voting, but he also says if there had been successful attempts to corrupt elections, he wouldn’t know.

No one disputes the need to protect election integrity. Our history is rife with election crimes, from wardheeling through Boss Tweed and Chicago’s Richard Daley, to magic boxes of ballots appearing at the last minute -- for example, a suspicious box of absentee ballots that appeared quite literally at the last second and determined a 1980’s Michigan House race -- or the North Carolina ballot harvesting caper. Most elections are not subject to fraud, but then most banks aren’t robbed but still have vaults.

And Mr. Evnen is right in his emphasis that some people --not all, not most, not even a fair sample -- could have an incentive to corrupt the system. Some partisan howling against absentee voting is taking on a disturbing tone that anyone who votes absentee is a crook.

“Good people in both parties have tried to address this. But what happens?” he said. “Nothing happens.” Some people are invested in not making changes to protect the system, he said.

Reasonable as many of Mr. Evnen’s administrative concerns are, we still find ourselves facing an election during a pandemic that has to date killed the equivalent of three-quarters of Lincoln, Nebraska’s population. It is impossible to provide complete and perfect safety but it is also reasonable that voters have the safest legal options available to them. Which now is no reason absentee voting, so we can trust folks like Mr. Evnen and his 49 colleagues will take every step needed to protect the integrity of the ballot.

As for this reporter, I can say my conversation with Bob on the subject was the most adult and sober conversation we ever had. Heavy emphasis on the “sober.”