“But I have no idea how voting by mail will affect this.”

And we don’t know. Before the pandemic, five states regularly conducted elections by mail, but the rest of the nation is new at this.

WASHINGTON POST

There’s early evidence that more Democrats are voting by mail than Republicans in primaries this year, writes The Fix’s Aaron Blake. And that may be driven by President Trump’s unsupported allegations that mail voting leads to fraud. Recently, some Republican voters in Michigan burned their absentee ballot applications in protest of voting that way.

Perhaps the biggest concern about vote by mail comes not from partisanship but the pure logistics of how to do it, basically, nationwide. A big question: Can the U.S. Postal Service handle all these mailed ballots?

In Colorado, which has been doing voting by mail for years, officials stuff ballots into envelopes with a smart bar code so voters can track the ballots. The official who set this up told me that is one of the best practices to give voters confidence in the process.

But many state election officials are overwhelmed just trying to figure out how to hold an election in a pandemic and don’t have the time or money to set something like that up. That will leave voters reliant on trusting that the Postal Service is getting their ballot to them and back in time to be counted.

That could be a problem, reports The Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee. The Postal Service has already failed to deliver more than a thousand absentee ballots in Wisconsin, and voters in other states say they never got theirs.

For its part, the Postal Service is warning that states are setting up unrealistic expectations for mail voting. For example, if states allow voters just a couple of business days to request, fill out and return a ballot by Election Day, the Postal Service may not be able to handle that. And courts in states such as Michigan and Minnesota have ruled that ballots must be in by Election Day.

Voting advocates say the solution would be more money for the Postal Service and state election officials. We’ll see whether Congress comes up with that.