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President Donald Trump urged Republicans to “fight very hard” against mail-in elections during the coronavirus pandemic — but the party’s most effective tactic to impede absentee voting may be just quietly running down the clock.



The handful of American vendors that sell mail-in election equipment told BuzzFeed News they have been flooded with phone calls this month from local election officials who anticipate a surge of requests for absentee ballots. More Americans than ever are expected to try voting from home in the general election, particularly after seeing crowds at polling sites during Wisconsin’s primary, which health officials have now linked to 19 new infections of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Yet the companies can’t sell the thing election officials need most: time.

“I would call it an emergency situation,” said Carl Amacker, whose company, BlueCrest, makes Relia-Vote, a system that handles outbound mail ballots and processes them once they’re returned.

BlueCrest currently supplies vote-by-mail systems to counties around the United States, yet like other leaders in the industry, it can’t expand those systems overnight. “Counties need to act very, very quickly,” Amacker told BuzzFeed News, explaining that it can take months to build and install mail-in election systems. “The problem is we are going to run out of time.”

Despite many inquiries in recent weeks, there are “not a lot of orders yet,” added Jeff Ellington, president of Runbeck Election Services, which makes envelope sorters, prints mail-in ballots, and develops software to manage mail-in elections.

“Every day they waffle on the decision, the harder it’s going to be to pull it off in time,” he told BuzzFeed News. “The capacity is there right now, but the longer the decisions are delayed, the fewer and fewer options that will exist for states.”

The emerging consensus among industry leaders and election experts is that expanding voting by mail for November — particularly in large jurisdictions that haven’t processed a huge number of absentee ballots in the past — could require making commitments in the next few weeks. Smaller counties, with just a few thousand voters, could accommodate more mail-in ballots without many changes.

Getting ready for a big spike in mail-in ballots can involve months of preparation: In addition to building new machinery, the mere act of printing ballots is complex, as neighbors can be in different legislative districts, so ballots have numerous variations. Mail-in elections also entail constructing multilayer security envelopes, assigning each envelope a barcode for tracking, and installing computer systems to help verify voter signatures upon return.

Delaware Election Commissioner Anthony Albence, a Democrat, said in a phone call with reporters this month that he’s “preparing for what we anticipate will be an increase of absentee voting,” adding, “We are going to have to shift our model to acquire additional scanners and printers.”

But decisions from many state and county election boards are frozen as Congress's first batch of emergency money trickles down slowly, and additional federal election relief is stuck in political limbo.

“We can pound our fist on the table and say they need to order today,” said Steven Sockwell, the vice president of Hart InterCivic, which provides scanners, software, and other voting services for mail-in elections.

“The reality is there are a lot of customers who can’t move yet because their bosses are saying, ‘Let’s see what happens with the federal funding,’” he said in a phone call. “There’s not a ton of orders yet, but there are a ton of quotes we’ve issued. Right now everyone is in a wait-and-see mode.”

The Nov. 3 election may feel distant, but there are unanswerable questions about when, and where, it will be safe again for Americans to cluster in groups to vote.

If local election offices get inundated with absentee ballot requests, and they’re incapable of mailing out and counting ballots within in timeframes set by state laws, the missed deadlines could result in disenfranchised voters, uncertainty, and lawsuits in a fraught presidential race and other elections across the country.

“The counties were already preparing for record numbers of people to vote in person,” Amacker said. “Now they’re preparing for record numbers voting by mail.”

“If the counties aren’t installed with the automated equipment and don’t have people trained, and testing completed, by the middle of September, you’ve missed the window for the November election,” he added.

It can take about eight weeks or more to produce big equipment, such as the envelope sorters the size of a bedroom, and some production has already ramped up. “These are relatively complicated pieces of machinery,” Amacker continued. “If by mid-May your equipment isn’t ordered and processed, it will be a challenge.”

It’s impossible to predict how many more people will vote by mail in November, however, partly because the rules are changing by the week. Seventeen states allow any registered voter to request a mail-in ballot, known as no-fault absentee voting, though court challenges could change that.

In Texas, a judge ruled on April 17 that any voter can cite the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason to vote absentee — though Texas Republicans may appeal the case and court orders could come down to the wire. A lawsuit in South Carolina also seeks to expand no-fault absentee voting. In contrast, in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced plans this week to mail absentee ballots to every voter who requests one for the June primary — a move that the state Republican Party claimed was unconstitutional.

More lawsuits, court rulings, legislative changes, and executive orders on who can vote absentee are all but guaranteed to become the norm between now and the fall — the question is if absentee voting is substantially expanded and voters request it, can local officials keep up?