How Ugly Politicking Ate Election Oversight
This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica.
Updated at 2:15 p.m. ET on July 22, 2020.
On March 20, state election administrators got on a conference call with the Election Assistance Commission to plead for help. The EAC is the bipartisan federal agency that was established for the precise purpose of maintaining election integrity through emergencies, and this was, by every account, an emergency. In a matter of weeks, the coronavirus had grown from an abstract concern to a global horror, and voting by mail was the only way ballots could safely be cast in states that had not yet held their presidential primaries. But many officials didn’t know the basics: what machines they would need and where to get them; what to tell voters; how to make sure ballots reached voters and were returned to county offices promptly and securely. “I have a primary coming up, and I have no idea what to do,” Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske said on the call.
She and her colleagues didn’t get the help they were looking for. Of the EAC’s four commissioners, only Ben Hovland, the chair, spoke, and his responses were too vague to satisfy his listeners. The lack of direction was “striking,” says one participant, Jennifer Morrell, an election consultant and a contractor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “It felt to me that there was no leadership. Nobody was saying, ‘Hey, let’s figure this out.’ Questions just went unanswered.”
The commission punted. On a follow-up call, Hovland volunteered the state of Washington, which votes almost entirely by mail, to respond to questions and provide materials. But Washington built its vote-by-mail system over more than a decade and had accumulated thousands of pages of detailed instructions, too much for other states to implement quickly. Hovland agreed in vague terms to pitch in, but others involved saw little evidence. “We started working with the EAC, and then it just started to get kind of cold,” says Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. “Nothing happened, nothing good or bad. Just nothing.”
Dogged by partisan infighting, the constant threat of elimination, and a budget that bottomed out last year at less than half what it once was, the EAC has long failed to be effective or even relevant. Current commissioners have dramatically decreased the number of votes taken on important issues. The EAC also hasn’t approved a full set of voting-machine standards since 2005; in 2018, new machines pegged to the old standards malfunctioned in Indiana, and decades-old machines in Georgia failed to record a stunning 150,000 votes for lieutenant governor, spurring ongoing litigation.
