Americans at the ballot box have historically adopted the adage: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Does that mean Trump will win a second term?
Richard Forno, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A ransomware attack on election-related government computers in a Georgia county raises the specter of more disruptions for Election Day voting and vote tabulation.
Democracy only works well when citizens participate in the democratic process and participate equally. But in the United States, lack of trust is eroding democracy’s promise.
Laws that have long kept campaigners away from voters at polling places may not work in a world where a T-shirt symbol can be interpreted as campaigning.
Strangers used to call and stop by; now the most effective way to get people to vote involves getting groups of friends and neighbors to pressure each other to participate in democracy.
This year is seeing a high number of absentee and mail-in ballots and voting in the period before Election Day – but early voting periods are not new to the 2020 election.
A recent Pew survey showed just how deep the divide has become, with about 40% of registered voters saying that they didn’t have a single close friend supporting a different presidential candidate.
‘I don’t like the candidates,’ ‘I don’t know enough to make a decision,’ ‘I don’t want to give this election legitimacy’ – an ethicist takes on nonvoters.
An army of mostly older, white volunteers run America’s voting sites. They’re reluctant to work during a pandemic. So new recruits are signing up to run the polls, for better and for worse.
Russian agents reportedly placed malware in U.S. voter registration systems in 2016 and are actively interfering in the 2020 election. Here’s the state of election cybersecurity.
Hundreds of thousands of people are waiting for their naturalization applications to be processed by US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Without citizenship, they can’t vote.