Understaffed local election offices are dealing with unprecedented pressure amid a voting landscape changed by the COVID-19 pandemic and newer threats, such as aggressive poll watchers.
This has led to unprecedented pressure on local election offices and a changed landscape to navigate for some of the nation's 217 million registered voters. During the primaries, polling places were bedeviled by short staffing, ballot printing errors, aggressive poll watchers and even malware attacks on voting equipment.
Poll worker positions are often going unfilled, as the hassles of the job — long hours, low pay and a perceived increase in physical risk — outweigh the feeling of fulfilling a critical civic duty. Printing errors marred primary elections in Oregon and Pennsylvania earlier this year, forcing local election officials to redo or recount thousands of mailed ballots. In Oregon, a Democratic state lawmaker called for an investigation into the fiasco, which delayed results in a U.S. House race in a state that has exclusively voted by mail for 23 years. The race was called 10 days later.
Federal law requires that voters who aren't listed on official rolls but assert they are registered and eligible be offered provisional ballots. An AP analysis found no evidence that the receptacles are subject to widespread fraud, vandalism or theft, a claim promoted in the discredited film “2000 Mules.” Yet bands of “drop box monitors” have begun springing up around the U.S. to stake out the boxes and watch — they say — for nefarious activity.
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