Elections in a pandemic: to postpone or not to postpone? | thearticle

There has been speculation, not least here, about whether the Government will postpone elections scheduled for 6 May 2021 — some (such as that for the London mayor) for a second time. Yet it

can hardly have escaped the world’s attention that the US just held a presidential election. Like virtually every other area of public life, democracy’s “normal service” has been severely

disrupted by the pandemic and governments have had to move quickly and imaginatively to respond. A recent survey suggests that, since the start of the pandemic, across the globe 75 elections

have been postponed, while 101 went ahead, and 49 elections have been held that were initially postponed. So, why did some countries hold elections while others postponed theirs? What did

the countries that went ahead do to make them safe? The answers to these questions often tell a deeper story. First, there are the legal considerations. One reason why the UK postponed its

elections and the US didn’t is simply that we could, and they couldn’t. The timing of UK elections is determined by Parliament and the Coronavirus Act 2020 postponed all UK elections due to

take place last year until May 2021. A large government majority ensured that this Act went through in just four days in March last year, with negligible opposition, despite the fact that

elections that were postponed included those of the powerful mayors of London, Manchester and elsewhere. Things aren’t as simple in America: Article 2 of the Constitution fixes the

President’s term of office at four years, with the current term ending on 20 January 2021. Without an election in November there would have been no one to run the country after that date.

One way around that would have been for the US to amend its Constitution, but that would have needed big majorities of both Houses. In other words, a lot of Democrats would have needed to

vote to extend Donald Trump’s term of office. Need I say more? Next, there are the practical considerations of how to manage an election in a public health crisis. It is pretty tricky

telling people to stay at home, while at the same time encouraging them to go out and vote. The zeal of legislators in the UK to push through legislation postponing elections last year may,

in part, have been a response to the experience of their fellows on the other side of the Channel only days before. In France, municipal elections were scheduled for 15 March, just as the

first lockdown measures were being introduced. Turnout slumped, especially among older people and other vulnerable groups. Then, the French electoral system threw up a real problem: the

second round. To win these elections, a victor needed to gain a majority of 50 per cent; if not, there is a run-off election. Although around 30,000 local administrations were elected on 15 

March, nearly 5,000 didn’t reach the quota and run-offs were due a week later. As case numbers soared, an emergency law was passed that delayed the second round but no one could predict with

any certainty when it would be safe to hold them. Instead, the decision was put on hold, but 27 May was fixed as a deadline by which polling day had to be set. Amid the chaos it was decided

that, if the re-runs could not be held by June at the latest, the legitimacy of the administrations elected on 15 March came into question and all the elections would need to be re-run. In

the event, case numbers eventually started to fall and the second round went ahead on 28 June. But an important principle came into play — you cannot postpone elections _that_ long without

some fundamental questions being asked. Where elections did go ahead across the world, efforts were made to make them safe. Familiar public health precautions — temperature checks and hand

sanitisers in polling stations — were combined with an array of practices to make voting easier and safer. In New Zealand, infected voters were allowed to vote by telephone, while the Czech

Republic provided drive-through voting. Switzerland took mobile ballot boxes to the elderly and vulnerable or those quarantined, so they could vote in their own homes. One obvious method of

making voting safer, while not undermining government calls to stay at home, is the use of postal or proxy votes. But turning to them as an easy fix proved controversial in countries (such

as the US) where there was no tradition of their widespread use. A six month to one-year bedding-in period between enactment and first use is considered advisable by election experts. As the

UK has a long tradition of postal and proxy voting, will it turn to them as a safe solution to allow the long-delayed elections to finally go ahead? Postal voting was first introduced as a

temporary measure at the end of the two world wars for service personnel stationed abroad. Over time, regulations were relaxed and postal voting was made available “on demand”. Once

bedded-in, it soon became apparent that postal voters were far more likely to use their votes than in-person voters. In the early 2000s this was taken to its logical extreme and the New

Labour government tried a number of successful pilots in local elections where all-postal ballots were held. The headline ran: “How to Increase Turnout? Close the Polling Stations!” However,

occasional high-profile cases of manipulation or downright fraudulent use of postal votes stoked fears of a threat to electoral integrity. The move ran out of steam, despite the Electoral

Commission recommending all-postal ballots as standard for council elections as a means of increasing notoriously low turnout. A more intractable problem with postal voting later emerged, as

it became clear that postal voting was disproportionately favourable to supporters of particular political parties and discussion of their use became irrevocably partisan. This was clearly

seen in the recent US presidential election, where approaches to the pandemic were, like so much else, sharply polarised. Mask-wearing Democrats were more Covid-aware and tended to use

“mail-in” (postal) ballots or avoid risk of close personal contact in packed polling stations by using early voting facilities, while liberty-loving Republicans preferred to go mask-free and

cast their vote on polling day. The outcome was the bizarre scenes of crowds of Donald Trump’s supporters chanting outside election facilities for the counting of “mail-in” ballots to be

stopped and the series of futile post-election challenges brought by his legal team, claiming that voter fraud meant that the election had been “stolen”. In the UK, it has been argued that

the Labour Party (which had piloted all-postal ballots) disproportionately benefits from more easily available postal voting.  Perhaps it is not that surprising, then, that the present

Conservative Government has headed in the opposite direction by tightening up postal voting requirements. It is reported to have ruled out all-postal ballots to mitigate public health

dangers during the current crisis. The Government faces a dilemma: they will be damned if they do postpone elections and damned if they don’t. On the one hand, it does not make much sense to

postpone elections in 2020 and then go ahead with them in 2021, when the pandemic situation is arguably as bad, if not worse. It is not just the doomsayers who argue that relying on mass

vaccination to return the country to anything approaching normality by an early May polling day looks like a risky strategy. But if elections do go ahead, we know that the Government has

shown itself uncomfortable with some of the methods, such as extended postal voting, that would mitigate public health risks. The real problem, though, is that in 2020 it postponed elections

for as long as a_ whole year, _which probably seemed like a good idea at the time but now looks like a case of having acted “not wisely but too well”. Typically, countries like France or

New Zealand that postponed elections did so for no more than a few weeks or months, to get past short-term lockdowns and to give electoral administrators time to set up safe voting

arrangements. A further postponement now would make it look like elections were being kicked into the very long grass. Already, incumbents have had their time in power extended from four

years to five without facing the electorate and their successors’ reduced to three years. The Prime Minister is fond of quoting from Classical sources. Perhaps he should take heed of Seneca,

the Roman and statesman and Stoic, who could have been thinking about elections during a public health crisis when he wrote: “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life.” A MESSAGE

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