The double-bind of voting in a pandemic: Minorities get screwed either way

 Are you old enough to remember the 2000 election?  The vote-counting mess?  The litigation?

You know that scene in a movie, where the protagonist's car stalls on the train tracks, the seat belt gets stuck, and...

Yeah.  That's where we are right now.  We have an election bearing down on us.  Or rather, we have post-election litigation bearing down on us, and unlike in 2000, we can see it coming before election day.  Yet, the 2000 election actually taught us a lot about election administration, and vote-counting methods.  The big problem in Florida was the punch card voting system.  In particular, if you combined that punch card voting system with the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, disaster ensued.

So what works?  Amid that mess, I got involved in the evaluation of vote-counting systems, and if I had my choice, I'd use "precinct-count optical scan" systems.  Optical scan just means scantron, like when you used to take those standardized tests.  They are easy, cheap, and when you combine them with counting them at the precinct, very few ballots get disqualified because administrators can catch errors, and voters can correct them.  So if you want to know my prescription, based research in which I participated led by Henry Brady, along with Matt Jarvis and John McNulty, just use precinct-count optical scan.  Normally.

And there's a really ugly twist to other voting systems.  In a paper that Matt Jarvis, John McNulty and I published in Perspectives on Politics, we showed that punch cards, for example, disproportionately disqualified ballots cast by minorities.

Why?  Two things:  a) we don't exactly know, but b) legally, it doesn't actually matter.

How can it not matter, legally?  I have made this observation in a few places lately, but this is where we get into the disparate impact standard.  And this is really important when it comes to civil rights and voting.  If there is one voting system that counts white and minority votes equally, and another voting system that disproportionately disqualifies minority votes, it doesn't matter why that second voting system disproportionately disqualifies minority votes.  Civil rights law requires the use of the voting system that counts votes equally, for the same legal reasoning that we throw out poll taxes and literacy tests, which were constructed to be race-neutral on their faces.  Disparate impact.  The standard we use to get around disingenuous policy.

Equal counting of votes is kind of important.

So here's the bind.  Absentee ballots are counted as essentially central-count optical scan, which have a lot of potential for disparate impact.  Yet, in-person voting places a higher medical risk on populations less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have higher risk factors.

Right now, a lot of the discussion of vote counting for the upcoming election speculates about a blue shift, in which an election night preliminary set of numbers would seem more favorable to Trump, but as more absentee ballots are counted, the election shifts to Biden, creating a problem when Trump inevitably claims election night victory and tries to block the counting of absentee ballots.  Which... we know will happen.

Yet, absentee ballots have a lot of potential problems, with respect to disproportionate disqualification of minority ballots anyway.  I don't think we're paying enough attention to this.  Central-count optical scan ain't a very good system, and minority vote disqualification is going to be an issue here.  Then again, they're screwed either way.