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The 16 statewide primary elections held during the pandemic reached a glaring nadir on Tuesday as Georgia saw a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems compounded by the state’s rapid expansion of vote-by-mail. But around the country, elections that have been held over the past two months reveal a wildly mixed picture, dominated by different states’ experiences with a huge increase in voting by mail. Over all, turnout in the 15 states and Washington, D.C., which rapidly expanded vote-by-mail over the past few months, remained high, sometimes at near record levels, even as the Democratic presidential primary was all but wrapped. (Corasaniti and Wines, 6/10)

Even the act of voting has become a partisan issue with racial implications in 2020. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say they’re willing to vote in person during a pandemic, while Democrats outpace Republicans in wanting to vote by mail, according to new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, which also shows racial differences as well. (Caputo, 6/11)

Before Georgia’s embattled election officials can fix a voting system that suffered a spectacular collapse, leading to absentee ballots that never got delivered and hourslong waits at polling sites on Tuesday, they must first figure out who is responsible. As multiple investigations begin into what went wrong, and as Democrats accuse the state’s Republicans of voter suppression, a picture emerged Wednesday of a systematic breakdown that both revealed general incompetence and highlighted some of the thorny and specific challenges that the coronavirus pandemic may pose to elections officials nationwide. (Fausset and Epstein, 6/10)

The electoral fiasco, paired with the failure to achieve swift justice in the case of Ahmaud Arbery — a young black man fatally shot by a white man and his son in Georgia’s Glynn County earlier this year — had exposed the need for a “new Civil Rights Act and a new Voting Rights Act to secure the franchise for all Georgians and all Americans, and to secure equal justice for every citizen,” Ossoff argued. “We have a system in Georgia that seemingly by design fails in areas where there’s high density of voting in high volume, and in counties that lack as much resources and as much equipment,” he said, criticizing the “overall architecture of voting in Georgia,” as well as the state’s “problem with mass disenfranchisement” and “major purges” of voter rolls. (Forgey, 6/10)

The warnings came from all sides in the months leading up to Georgia’s disastrous primaries on Tuesday: local election officials, voting rights advocates and even the state’s top election official. The combination of limited training on new voting machines and reduced polling locations due to the novel coronavirus could produce crushingly long lines and severely hamper voting access, they cautioned. (Gardner, Lee and Boburg, 6/10)

The registration of new voters dropped dramatically in the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic, challenging efforts of both major political parties to enlist new supporters in battleground states ahead of the 2020 election. The number of new voters registered across 11 states in April 2020 decreased by 70% compared with April 2016, according to a report from the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research released Thursday. (Garrison, 6/11)