Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald calls for primary election to be conducted by mail

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald on Monday called for the June 2 primary election to be conducted completely by mail because of concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.

“Holding an in-person election in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic would be, in and of itself, a disaster,” said Fitzgerald, who called for an expansion of the state’s emergency declaration to allow the county to send a ballot to every registered voter.

Fitzgerald said county Health Department Director Dr. Debra Bogen recommended the move.

“We are not going to have enough staff to work the election, and asking elected and appointed poll workers to work flies in the face of what we’ve been asking everyone in this county to do since mid-March,” Fitzgerald said. “Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, but in-person voting would jeopardize this community and potentially disenfranchise voters who would be afraid to come to the polls.”

Fitzgerald cited the system that Oregon officials use as a model.

“They just mail everybody a ballot and two envelopes: a secrecy envelope and a return-mail envelope,” he said. “You get your ballot, mark it, put in the secrecy envelope, which doesn’t get signed, then put that into the return envelope, which you do sign so that elections officials can verify your signature.”

Oregon voters approved the change in 1998, and it was implemented beginning in 2000. There are 34 states which currently allow what is called “no-excuse absentee voting,” where voters do not need a specific reason to request a mail-in ballot.

Philip Harold, political science professor at Robert Morris University, said he would expect “some hiccups in the process” if Allegheny County went with 100% mail-in ballots, especially with June 2 less than two months away.

“That’s a tight timeline,” he said. “It’ll really scramble things, because people aren’t used to that, won’t know about or understand it, and there’s potential for abuse, too.”

President Donald Trump sharply criticized mail-in voting in recent days, calling mail-in ballots “fraudulent in many cases,” despite also admitting that he voted by mail in last month’s Florida primary election.

Allegheny County has the capacity to send all residents an application for a mail-in ballot, but Fitzgerald said the expansion of the statewide emergency declaration would allow him to keep poll workers at home, many of whom are among the age grouping most vulnerable to covid-19.

“A lot of people have already applied (for mail-in ballots), but we’re still required to staff hundreds of polling places with 3,000 to 4,000 poll workers, and that’s what we need to shut down,” he said.

As testing capacity increases, health officials expect the number of covid-19 cases to rise, and Bogen said the social-distancing measures that are in place statewide are precautions that cannot be followed with an in-person primary election.

“Voting in person could put our most vulnerable populations at risk, those who are most at risk of serious infection,” she said. “Even if those individuals come out to vote, there is no way to remain physically distant at our polling places. This concern includes the majority of our poll workers, as working on election day would be unsafe for them.”

Harold said rolling out something on that large a scale will be tough in less than two months.

“My own bias is toward the in-person voting,” he said. “But this is kind of the wave of the future and what what we’re all forced to start thinking about.”

Mail-in ballots are already available to any registered voter who requests one and can be requested at Register.VotesPA.com.