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The 2020 presidential election is roughly a week away, and Americans are making plans to cast their ballots. So far, over 45 million absentee ballots have been cast, with most states already receiving more mail-in ballots than in 2016. The coronavirus pandemic has prompted more Americans to file for more mail-in ballots than in any election in history, but the process has been far from easy. Unnecessary barriers only serve to limit voting rights.

Each state has its own requirements for how mail-in ballots need to be filled out: using the right pen color, matching your signature to the one your state has on file and even obtaining the signatures of witnesses or notaries. Sealing the ballot properly within multiple envelopes and either dropping it off at an acceptable ballot box or mailing it in time pose additional barriers for some voters.

These requirements have made mail-in voting a difficult task for Americans across the nation, including many Syracuse University students living hours away from their home district. So why do these requirements exist?

Many politicians cite voter fraud as the reasoning behind keeping these rules in place, but the risk of voter fraud in the United States is effectively non-existent when it comes to voting by mail.

“As far as I understand, there is no real risk to voter fraud in this country. Voting by mail is safe, it makes voting easier. Making voting easier is a good thing. It’s the democratic thing to do,” said Maraam Dwidar, an assistant professor of political science at SU.

The U.S. asserts that democracy is its foremost virtue and that voting is our most important right and duty as Americans. But in reality, voting is hard, and it is often hard because of deliberate, calculated voter suppression. Mail-in-ballots are a substantial piece in that suppression in 2020.

“These increasingly complicated fields on absentee ballots, on vote-by-mail ballots, are arguably tantamount to a literacy test,” Dwidar said.

The country’s history of voter suppression begins with its founding, when only white, property-owning men could vote. American democracy has, at different points in its existence, explicitly excluded women, people of color, immigrants and low-income residents from its electorate. People who are incarcerated, as well as many who were formerly incarcerated, still don’t have access to this right.

Individuals who can’t afford to take a Tuesday off of work, parents who can’t afford to find childcare on Election Day, students who can’t get excused from class: all of these Americans technically have the right to vote, but they often lack the ability to. Unclear phrasing on mail in ballots can be particularly intimidating to Americans without a solid education and first-time voters, which includes many students.

So, who’s left?

With more Americans than ever voting by mail, the restrictions on mail-in-ballots have been brought to the forefront of this election. As residents struggle to fill out their ballots, it becomes ever clearer that these restrictions and rules are meant to keep specific groups of people from voting.

“For the most part, the people that are affected by what we can call these literacy tests — these really complicated vote-by-mail ballots — are young voters, first-time voters… Black and Hispanic voters and poor voters,” Dwidar said. “Typically the voters that are disenfranchised by complicated voting-by-mail procedures are left-leaning voters. So they’re (often) democratic voters who are disenfranchised.”

The 2020 presidential election has been positioned to be a referendum on American democracy, but the inaccessibility of mail-in-ballots will undeniably impact races up and down the ballot. They’ll be impacted by multi-hour wait times, the fact that Election Day still isn’t a national holiday and, on top of it all, the coronavirus pandemic.

Americans will risk their health and forfeit their time to commit to making this election as democratic as possible, and it will still fall short of being completely fair. This shortfall will not be the fault of the American people, but of the politicians who, at worst, constructed these barriers and, at best, failed to dismantle them. The sacrifices Americans make to cast their ballots every year, especially this year, are admirable. But they should be unnecessary.

Sydney Gold is a sophomore political science and magazine journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at segold@syr.edu. She can be followed on Twitter at @Sydney_Eden.

Published on October 28, 2020 at 10:37 pm