WASHINGTON - Ursula Gacek, head of the election observer mission to the United States from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, cheerfully refers to November 3, the U.S. presidential election, as “E-day.”
Gacek spoke to VOA by phone after the release last week of a report by the elections arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on the conditions leading up to election day.
She says 2020 is different than the previous nine elections that OSCE has observed. The United States, a member of the OSCE, invited the European observers after the 2000 presidential election, when the decision about who had won the presidential race went all the way to the Supreme Court before it was decided for George W. Bush over former vice president Al Gore. At the invitation of the U.S. government, OSCE has sent observation teams for every U.S. presidential and midterm election since then.
There’s more than one reason that this year is different. The most obvious, Gacek said, is the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to vastly scale down the number of observers sent to the U.S. Pre-pandemic, the office had planned to send 500. But after the pandemic hit, they scaled back to just 30.
COVID-19, Gacek said, “has made life difficult for everybody.” It has affected the way campaigns are conducted, the administration of the vote, and the amount of work election administrators must deal with. For voters, it has meant deciding whether to show up on election day, vote in person early, or send a ballot through the mail.
Gacek noted that this year is different in an additional way, in the attention focused on the mechanics of the election — how people cast their ballots and when the ballots will be counted. “Suddenly,” Gacek said, “people are asking, ‘will my vote count?’”
“I think the pressure is on everybody,” Gacek said. “It’s on the hardworking and really very decent election administration people. I have an awful lot of respect for them.”
Gacek’s team arrived in the United States in early October and fanned out across the nation in pairs. Their mission was to talk to election administrators, evaluate media coverage, examine voting technology, and get a sense of the local political atmosphere in the places where their presence is welcomed.
Eighteen U.S. states routinely deny access to OSCE observers. Gacek, who is not connected to the group of lawmakers who were turned away in North Carolina, said observers do not try to go to places where their presence is against the law.
After a month of phone calls, virtual meetings, and in-person visits, Gacek’s team issued what they call focused on conditions ahead of the election.
The October 22 report noted the complexities of administering a national election taking place in 50 states that each have different rules and voting equipment. In all, voting administration is handled by some 10,500 jurisdictions across the country. That’s complicated in a regular year — but this year, COVID-19 has also changed the options people have for voting. The voting workarounds devised this year have met no small amount of resistance.
The report notes that more than 365 lawsuits have been filed in 44 states and the District of Columbia over how people can vote and when their votes can be counted.
Complicating things further, the pandemic has resulted in shortages of both funding and personnel. Congress awarded emergency funding to the states in March to help pay for the extraordinary measures being implemented to give people a safe way to vote — but those funds, in the words of the report, “are largely regarded to be insufficient.” Moreover, there is a shortage of experienced poll workers, as many of those who have the most experience also are high-risk because of their age. Many of them are sitting this election out.
Other problems are ongoing.
There are differences among the jurisdictions in voting technologies. Of particular concern are a handful of jurisdictions that use voting machines that do not leave a paper trail, which can cause problems if there’s a need for a recount. There are differences between states in whether people who have been convicted of a crime should be allowed to vote. The observers concluded that some 5.2 million citizens are disenfranchised due to criminal convictions. The report notes that such restrictions disproportionally affect racial minorities.