{"id":12409,"date":"2020-03-26T12:52:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T16:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=12409"},"modified":"2020-03-26T12:52:44","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T16:52:44","slug":"maryland-needs-to-do-much-better-to-protect-the-2020-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=12409","title":{"rendered":"Maryland Needs to Do Much Better to Protect the 2020 Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Yesterday, the State Board of Elections made a bad decision. They decided to switch to all-mail voting for this year&#8217;s elections (fine) but doing so <a href=\"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/politics\/bs-md-pol-maryland-primary-election-june-drop-off-ballot-20200325-d4ft7ccvvjgjxjbfhnraoex5ta-story.html#nt=interstitial-manual\">without putting in standard protections<\/a> (definitely not fine) taken by states like Oregon that conduct all of their elections by mail:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Board members questioned how the state will verify that ballots are being cast by the actual voters they sent them to. Charlson said the state\u2019s  current absentee ballot procedure is to check for a signature.<\/p><p>\u201cWe\u2019re  not actually looking at the signatures, are we?\u201d asked Howells. \u201cIn vote-by-mail states, I think they used software to compare the  signatures.\u201d<\/p><p>\u201cOur problem is we are not a vote-by-mail state, so we have no real safeguards built into it,\u201d Cogan said.<\/p><p>The board quickly moved on from the topic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/opinion\/op-ed\/bs-ed-op-0327-vote-by-mail-20200326-b76otansffax7l52xayv4jzysy-story.html\">Read my op-ed piece online now<\/a> or in the print edition of tomorrow&#8217;s <em>Baltimore Sun<\/em> to learn more on why this is a problem and more generally what the State needs to do to make sure the 2020 elections come off well despite challenges posed by coronavirus. Otherwise, close elections like the upcoming Baltimore City mayoral primary could go bad surprisingly fast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, the State Board of Elections made a bad decision. They decided to switch to all-mail voting for this year&#8217;s elections (fine) but doing so without putting in standard protections (definitely not fine) taken by states like Oregon that conduct all of their elections by mail: Board members questioned how the state will verify that &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=12409\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Maryland Needs to Do Much Better to Protect the 2020 Elections<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2311,1073,1271],"tags":[1617,1554],"class_list":["post-12409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-2020","category-voter-fraud","category-voting-rights","tag-baltimore-city","tag-baltimore-sun"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-3e9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12409"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12412,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12409\/revisions\/12412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}