'Swing County, USA' Prepares For Unprecedented Influx Of Ballots By Mail
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Will we know who won the presidency by the end of the night on November 3? Well, here's what we heard when we put that question to people either directly involved with or closely tracking the vote in Pennsylvania.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Million-dollar question (laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I would probably say no.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: That's a valid question. The answer might be no.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Not confident.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I think that we may not.
KELLY: Pennsylvania is among the handful of states that could decide the outcome of the election if it's close. It was a battleground state in 2016, too. Trump won but barely - a margin of less than 1%. This November Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar told me she expects a sea change in the number of Pennsylvanians casting their ballots by mail.
KATHY BOOCKVAR: I would expect that we would probably see about 50% cast by mail.
KELLY: Wow - 50%. I mean, it's stunning.
BOOCKVAR: It is stunning considering we've historically been 5%.
KELLY: Now, while there's little evidence that mail ballots are not secure, they can take longer to count. So what are the implications of that? What if results are delayed by days, even weeks? We wanted to see how Pennsylvania is preparing, so we hopped in the car and pointed north up I-95.
And we just crossed the state line crossing from Delaware over into Pennsylvania.
Keep heading north, and you arrive at the part of Pennsylvania where we're going to spend these next minutes - the Lehigh Valley, Northampton County. We're here because in a key swing state, this is a key swing region. Politically, it's about as purple as you can get - one of just three counties in the whole state that went for Barack Obama twice then swung to Trump.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: So I'm calling the meeting to order.
KELLY: We've just pulled up to the outdoor meeting of the Democratic Women of Nazareth and Vicinity, a couple dozen women spread out and socially distanced on park benches, everybody wearing masks.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.
KELLY: It's their first meeting since the pandemic hit. They tell us the virus makes it tough to knock on doors, so they are kicking off a postcard campaign. And they are focused - really focused - on the possibilities of voting by mail.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Can I just have a show of hands of how many people already have registered to get their mail-ins?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: For November?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: For November.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: I tried to get on, and they said they...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Votepa.com.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: OK.
KELLY: Here's the thing. You used to have to give a reason if you wanted to vote by mail in Pennsylvania. That law changed last year. So election officials were expecting a modest increase in mail ballots for 2020. Then came the coronavirus. This spring, as the primary loomed, poll workers quit. They were worried about getting sick. Voters were worried about getting sick. Pennsylvania postponed its April primary, and by the time they held it last month, record numbers of ballots poured in by mail.
AMY HESS: This is our new office.
KELLY: Amy Hess, deputy registrar of elections for Northampton County - she's giving us a tour around the county government offices in Easton.
HESS: So this is our locked ballot room with a security camera.
KELLY: Offices which they have had to reconfigure given the unique challenges of 2020. Hess shows us where they set up tables on primary day to accommodate all the workers slicing open envelopes, extracting the ballot.
HESS: What took the longest was unfolding it and flattening it out.
KELLY: Now, in Northampton County, primary day went pretty smoothly according to county executive Lamont McClure.
LAMONT MCCLURE: We were the first county in Pennsylvania to have our complete results in.
KELLY: Really?
MCCLURE: Yes.
KELLY: Results in by 9 p.m. But on November 3 they are bracing for a tsunami - a hundred thousand mail in ballots in this county alone. Under current state law, counties cannot start confirming voter eligibility or start opening envelopes until the morning of Election Day. There is a push for the state legislature to change that in these next few weeks, a change which McClure - a Democrat - told me would make a big difference.
MCCLURE: Based on our experience from the primary, we just don't think it's physically possible to count the potential 100,000 mail-in ballots that day.
KELLY: Now, McClure is talking about a delay of hours in reporting results. But it is worth injecting here in other parts of Pennsylvania, there are still races from the June 2 primary where we don't yet have an official winner. So imagine a scenario where days, a week after the presidential election, votes are being counted, lawsuits are being filed and questions are being asked about the legitimacy of the election. This is a scenario being fed by the man trying to win reelection. The president has tweeted inaccurately about widespread mail-in ballot fraud and warned of a rigged 2020 election and that results could be delayed for months. I asked Lamont McClure if he's worried.
MCCLURE: We're not worried about fraud at all, and we're not worried about a rigged election in Northampton County. I would - I'm a Democrat. I'm going to be for Joe Biden. I'd die before I let this election be rigged.
FRANK DEVITO: Is President Trump's - is it possible what he's saying? Yeah, in theory. I mean, I think it's easier...
KELLY: This is Frank DeVito - attorney, Republican, member of the Northampton County Election Commission - a Trump Pence 2020 sign planted in his front yard. His toddler children came out to greet us, and then we sat at a picnic table, a rooster crowing from the next yard over. DeVito agrees there is no evidence that voting by mail leads to massive fraud. But he plans to vote in person, and he is sympathetic to the president's view that doing otherwise creates problems.
DEVITO: If you show up physically, you sign a paper, you vote, the chain of custody is very limited. But when things are going out to a mailbox and then back to the voter registration office sometimes weeks before the election and then more of them come in on Election Day that are being dropped off in boxes at the courthouse - the county is doing their best. It's not a free-for-all where just mail-in ballots are going to go disappearing in suitcases. I certainly don't think so. So I would give reassurances, but I would give guarded reassurances that I still think there are a lot more holes in the system.
KELLY: For the record, again, there is no proof that mail ballots have posed significant threat to election security. But public trust can be fragile. The perception of chaos can be as damaging and as polarizing as actual chaos. The local Democratic Party is already busy trying to manage expectations, pumping out the message on social media that it may take a while to know who won in Pennsylvania and the most important thing is to get an accurate count. I was curious if that message is resonating and, just generally, what's on voters' minds here - so one more stop.
We've pulled up now to Bethlehem, one of the cities in Northampton County, making our way down Main Street, which is so pretty - old, historic, brick sidewalks, benches out, people sitting on them, eating ice cream.
We walked up and down Main Street, talking with people for a while. And then we got lucky because if you were trying to capture the diversity of political views in this corner of Pennsylvania, you could not do better than these two adjacent tables on a shady sidewalk outside the Spanish tapas bar and restaurant.
ABIGAIL ILLINGWORTH: Hey there. Hi.
KELLY: Can we say hi? We are journalists from NPR.
At the table farther from the curb, Abigail Illingworth - she's from Hellertown, another town nearby, about to start senior year in college. This is her first time voting in a presidential election.
This is quite an election to have it be your first one.
ILLINGWORTH: It sure is. Yeah, it sure is (laughter).
KELLY: Who are you voting for?
ILLINGWORTH: I do believe I will be going with Biden.
KELLY: For Biden.
ILLINGWORTH: Yes.
KELLY: Can you give me a sense why?
ILLINGWORTH: I just do not agree with President Trump's policies or beliefs whatsoever - any of them.
KELLY: Illingworth dismisses the president's warnings of fraud and a rigged election, and she's appalled at his handling of the pandemic. Trump's long refusal to wear a mask, she says, sets a very poor example. Just a few feet away, polishing off what looked like a tiny tostada sat Iliana. She declined to give her last name for privacy reasons. She's 39 years old, works at one of the big hospitals in the Lehigh Valley, also a Trump voter.
ILIANA: I feel like he is the only president that is come in not as a politician and more of a businessman and more aware of trying to protect the economy as well as trying to limit some of the drug trafficking that's coming - going on in America as well. I definitely think that the media portrays him to be more of a bad person than he actually is.
KELLY: What about the pandemic, I asked. What do you make of how he's handled it?
ILIANA: I definitely think that, you know, it is something to be concerned about. But at the same time, I do think that the media is portraying it to be a lot bigger than what it is.
KELLY: After that, Iliana circled back a third time in our short interview to what she sees as unfair reporting on the president - fake news. On the next block under a wide green awning with Johnny's Bagel and Deli spelled across it, we'd arranged to meet Samuel Chen, GOP staffer-turned-consultant. He used to work for former Republican Gov. John Kasich, former Republican Congressman Charlie Dent and others. He has never voted for a Democrat at the top of the ticket before, but...
SAMUEL CHEN: I consider myself an undecided Republican voter who, in the moment, is leaning toward Vice President Biden.
KELLY: Leaning but not quite there yet. He wants to see who Biden picks as his running mate. Chen grew up near here. Over iced coffees, we talked about the region's reputation as a bellwether for the rest of the state and Pennsylvania's outsized role in the national outcome.
CHEN: I think the election swings on people like me and on these undecideds because we know how Texas is going to go. We know how California is going to go. We're looking at a handful of states and a handful of voters in those states.
KELLY: Chen communicated something I sensed from other people we interviewed here - the weight of responsibility they feel for making sure Pennsylvania doesn't blow it on November 3.
CHEN: Now you have the mail-in issue. There is a lot of concern among election officials, Republican and Democrat, of making sure we get this right. And how do we make sure we don't call it too early and have to retract it? But how do we make sure we're not a month afterwards and the whole country is saying, hey, Pennsylvania. Do you have election result yet? - especially if it swings on this state.
KELLY: The worst-case scenario, Sam Chen says - what happened in Florida in 2000 but updated for the Twitter era and unfolding during a pandemic. For those who need a refresher, in 2000 - Bush versus Gore - Americans waited 36 days to learn who'd won.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOEY PECORARO'S "HERE WE ARE AGAIN")
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