Voting during a pandemic

Polling booths set up at the Union Drive Community Center for a previous election prior to COVID-19.

Katherine Kealey
June 1, 2020

Over 486,000 absentee ballots have been requested for the Iowa primaries after Iowa Secretary Paul Pate sent absentee ballot request forms to every voter due to the pandemic.  

Events such as town halls and rallies have come to a halt, and in-person voting has become a challenge due to social distancing. Regardless of the outcome, any candidate running during this election cycle, and the election process itself, will be faced with the barriers COVID-19 will bring.

The pandemic has already impacted the election process by states postponing their national primaries until June.

Ashton Randolph is a sophomore from Hudson, Wisconsin, and studying electrical engineering at Iowa State. Randolph said this election would have been her first time voting, but she stayed home because she did not want to risk her health. She said she received her absentee ballots after the date she was supposed to mail them in by, so she was unable to take part in the election. 

“I do think it is important to keep updated with politics because that is who is going to be leading our country,” Randolph said. “I feel like you should know about it and be educated about it if you vote.”

Karen Kedrowski, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center, said mail-in ballots from a public health standpoint promote safety while keeping democracy going. However, it creates a barrier for some.

“For habitual and experienced voters, they are going to figure this out,” Kedrowski said. “If they are determined, then they are going to get their ballots and will submit them.”

Kedrowski said the whole process of mail-in ballots can be unfamiliar and that steps to turn in the ballot, such as getting a stamp, are real barriers to non-habitual voters like students. She said she predicts the 2020 election could have a drop in youth voter turnout if the election is all mail in or predominantly mail in.

She said this is because it is a “different political socialization process.” States such as Washington only do mail-in ballots. But for states like Iowa, Kedrowski said this would be a significant shift, making it harder to get students out to vote.

States that do have all-mail elections are Colorado, Washington, Oregan, Utah and Hawaii. In some states, there is an increase in voter turnout, such as Washington and Utah, as reported in a 2018 report from Pantheon Analytics. 

Kedrowski said switching to an all mail-in election because of the pandemic will require educating students on the process and how to get involved to prevent a loss in youth voter turnout.

“It is certainly a heavy lift in terms of educating students on what they need to do,” Kedrowski said. “We lose that positive peer pressure that comes from having a lot of students on campus standing in line at the Memorial Union […] and they make it a social event. All the excitement that comes around on Election Day anyway, we are going to miss that. That’s just going to be gone, and I think that will have a detrimental impact on our student voter turnout.”

Organizations like NextGen work to increase voter turnout for ages 18 to 35-year-olds for progressive candidates.

During the pandemic, NextGen Press Secretary Murphy Burke said their work to prepare for the 2020 election has primarily been on digital outreach, and all of the forms such as pledge to vote cards and petitions are now online.

“This means that our organizers are spending a lot of time on social media making sure that the people on their networks know all the various ways that they can get involved,” Burke said. “I think young people are digital natives so using social media is nothing new to us, we are just spending more time on that.”

Burke said a lot of that goal means working to remove the barriers that exist.

“Whether it [the barriers] is people not feeling trust in the political process, or there being institutional barriers that keep people from voting,” Burke said. “So a lot of our work is to remove those barriers, so people feel that there is an importance of them showing up to vote, especially young people and that they are not held back from voting.”

Mack Shelley, political science department chair, said to increase voter turnout, voters must have something of importance to them or salience, then they must feel a sense of engagement to act on it.

“There are certain issues that are really important, and that may be something that drives you to the polls, to one cabinet or another, or one party or another,” Shelley said. “People have to have a sense of engagement that they will really make a difference.”

Shelley and Kedrowski said those who are engaged in politics tend to be people who are more engaged in social sciences or humanities as opposed to STEM.

In 2018 the majors that had the highest percentage of voter turnout were history, English language and literature, public administration and social service professions. Majors with the lowest voter turnout in 2018 were computer and information science, engineering and engineering technologies, and mathematics and statistics, according to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement.

Shelley said trends like this could possibly shift or change due to the pandemic. 

“If one of the things that comes out of the current COVID-19 crisis is a greater sense of community, belongingness and at least for the time being, a lot more respect for medical heros as opposed to other types like military, it could lead to a great sense of connectivity to society as a whole,” Shelley said. 

However, many critics saw Republicans push to move forward with the election as a way to suppress voter turnout. Shelley said the decision to move forward with the election was at the outcome of partisan-based infighting. 

“You notice that Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, have been arguing precipitously against mail-in ballots,” Shelley said. “Republicans have kind of convinced themselves, and it is hard to know if it is really true, that the more you provide for mail-in ballots, the more you expand electors in general, the worse it is going to be for Republicans.”

On May 28 President Donald Trump posted a tweet admitting that mail-in voting would be a threat to the Republican party.

Shelley said restricting the right to vote is something Republicans have aimed to do and the voting demographics will begin to change, impacting the Party’s popularity. By the year 2050, the majority of the U.S. population will be non-white, according to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“From the perspective of the Republican Party that is getting to be almost exclusively a party of white-nonHispanic and older age votes, which means they are dying off at a more rapid rate, it is absolutely frightening for them,” Shelley said. “It is an existential threat to think about expanding the right to vote in this current electorate, and even more so, the rising electorate once these people become of voting age, who are really not going to be inclined toward Republicans in general. That is, of course, what sparked a lot of Republican efforts to restrict the right to vote.”