Are you worried about your mail ballot getting rejected? Why this progressive leader says you shouldn’t be.

Democratic voters overwhelmingly decided after the coronavirus pandemic began that they wanted to cast their ballot this election through the mail.

And almost as soon as they did, the panic set in.

Democratic voters, strategists, and even some non-partisan analysts have spent months voicing deep concerns over whether a potentially high rejection rate of mail ballots — which are expected to surge this year in swing states like Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — could ultimately cost the party votes. The problem was especially acute over the summer in some primaries, where the Washington Post reported more than a half-million ballots were rejected.

In a close election, it could make the difference between winning and losing critical House and Senate seats — and perhaps even the presidential race itself.

To answer some of these questions, McClatchy reached out to Greg Speed, the president of America Votes, a nonprofit group that works to increase progressive voter participation. His group is at the center of voter turnout efforts in many battlegrounds, and his views on mail-in voting are broadly reflective of how many Democrats feel about the strategy.

What follows is a transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of angst among Democrats that the push to vote through the mail will cost votes. Broadly speaking, how do you respond to that?

The strategy from the beginning has been about spreading out the vote, maximizing the opportunities for voters to vote by different means, whether it be mail, early or in-person voting, both as a means of increasing turnout and as an obvious imperative when we’re conducting an election in a pandemic. And so that’s been misconstrued by some to mean that that Democrats and progressives are only encouraging voters to vote by mail. And the strategy from the beginning has been about not denigrating any one means of voting, but educating voters about the many safe, secure means [of voting].

But how much of a concern is there that votes cast through the mail will be disqualified?

The rejected ballots are a very real concern, and one that is being addressed through increased emphasis on voter registration, and in many states, programs to directly contact voters to cure those ballots.

But the shortcoming of these analyses is that they assume we do not lose as many votes due to long lines and other issues at polling places, whether it be early voting in a limited number of locations in early states or Election Day voting. And those are enormous challenges in every single election, most especially in presidential election years, and those issues would be magnified tremendously in the pandemic.

Why would they be magnified in a pandemic?

Long lines have afflicted Democratic-leaning communities in densely populated urban areas in particular in election after election. And those challenges have been magnified post-Shelby with the closing of many polling places, and those challenges will be made even greater in a scenario where folks are going to be expected to wear masks and stay socially distant for potentially hours on end.

It is terrifying to think the levels of suppression we would see and, or the levels of infection we would see if we’re not pursuing a spread-out-the-vote strategy, which emphasized mail early on, and in-person early voting and then Election Day voting.

Some of these problems with rejected mail ballots were prevalent during this year’s primaries.

Let’s not forget these primaries were taking place, in many cases, at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, where first-time applications were pouring in the final, you know, couple weeks, in the final days before the election.

What those of us who are advocating for mail the general election have been saying is that those primaries were opportunities to grow our VBM rolls for the general election, but no one is going to be advocating in the final days of late October and November for recruiting new voters to vote by mail.

That is not what we will be seeing this time around. Those voters are receiving their ballots now, and we’re telling voters to get ballots back promptly. … It’s a very different context in what we were seeing in some of the most challenging places that unfortunately did see large numbers of ballots rejected.

So you think the rejection rates will be lower in the general election?

In many states the rejection rates will be lower now that the VMB pools are much larger, there’s going to be a much more orderly process of getting ballots out early, with plenty of time for voters to get them back, which in many states in the primary was not the case. We were talking about a matter of a week or just days versus what we’re seeing right now in states, which are seeing significantly increased pools of mail applications receiving their ballots weeks before the general election.

With that in mind, rejection rates will hopefully look more like the norms we’ve seen in states like Florida, Arizona, and Oregon, rather than the spikes in rejections that we saw in the frenetic primary process.

The left is deeply worried about so-called “naked ballots” in Pennsylvania. Do you share that concern?

The naked ballot issue in Pennsylvania is one of the most significant concerns we see with mail balloting, and an area of enormous focus for our voter education efforts.

We’re still early in the return in Pennsylvania, so that’s something we all feel good about. There’s a lot of emphasis. We can probably give you more color on efforts that are being undertaken, but I’ll just tell you, this is a major, major focus of a lot of education.

Backing up for a second here, there are big differing bets being placed by the two parties here, with Democratic voters expected to vote through the mail at much higher rates than Republicans. Are you confident that you have picked the better approach?

We’re very confident that this is the right strategy, and the early returns in mail ballots are confirming that fact. Democrats are voting in enormous numbers by mail in states ways beyond what we’ve seen previously in some key states.

If you need further evidence, for the soundness of this strategy, look no further than the consternation of Republican strategists and none other than Mitch McConnell, who’s imploring President Trump to stop suppressing their own vote through the outrageous claims he’s been making in vote by mail. And you’re seeing the Republican political class freaking out about this, because they’re looking at the same that we are, which is large numbers of Democrats are voting by mail, they’re getting in their ballots early. And we’re also seeing significant numbers in key states of voters who did not cast ballots in 2016 or were unregistered in 2016, now registered to vote by mail, and those numbers are also disproportionately Democratic.

But were those voters always going to turn out, and you just got them to do so early?

Couple of points on that: There’s no question that the majority of Democratic mail voters are more reliable, higher propensity voters. We’re encouraged by how the pool of mail voters has become more diverse in some states, like Florida, become more racially diverse, younger.

But there’s also no question that many voters of color, most voters of color, will continue voting in person, many of them early or on Election Day.

That doesn’t mean we’re not benefiting from the vote-by-mail strategy. Because remember, the goal at the beginning of this was spreading out the vote. Making sure our vote, which is disproportionately vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19 on Nov. 3, in major cities, with fewer polling places, etc.

If we are spreading out our vote and banking our vote early and mobilizing our voters who will choose to vote in person, to vote early in person and on Election Day, that’s exactly what our strategy was from the beginning. And the number that we have seen so far validate that approach purely on a means of combating the pandemic. But there’s also evidence that it has grown our electorate to some degree as well.

Are you still worried about delays at the Post Office? That was a big concern a month ago among Democrats.

I would say if ballots are returned well in advance of the election, that allays most of the concerns regarding the Postal Service.

How worried are you that if these mail-in ballots take days or even weeks to count, that Trump will call them invalid and try to discredit the results of the election?

In many states, the mail ballots get counted first. That certainly is true in Florida, we expect a prompt count in Arizona, and the picture from there is certainly some of the blue wall states will begin counting on Election Day. But there it will be a real mix of some of those ballots will be counted with Election Day votes, some will be the first ballots counted, and some might be the last. But again, many of these concerns around the so-called red mirage, are going to be addressed by prompt returns of ballots being sent out now.

I’m not clear why returning your ballots early will help.

Well, the ballots in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan — the mail ballots will begin being counted on Election Day.

The whole notion that because they’re mail ballots in the blue wall states, and they won’t be pre-processed as they will be in Florida, and Arizona, and I think North Carolina, that will somehow lead to dragged out count is not totally accurate within the blue wall. There is some murkiness on what the counties are going to do, because this is a much larger scale than we have seen. But again, a lot of this is informed by the experiences of the primary in a case where Wisconsin was under a court order in the April election to not open those ballots for over a week later, or what we’ve seen historically out of California and Arizona, where ballots do trickle in after Election Day.

The notion that that will be at the scale, that everything is going to be in doubt, is not really well-founded. It may add a day or so, and there may be in a close election, certainly ballots trickling in in those states will have an impact, as it did in Arizona in 2018.

But it may not in an election where [Joe] Biden is winning convincingly. There is certainly reason to believe that mail ballots received well in advance of Election Day will be counted election night or soon after in many of the most important states.

This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.