The California Sunday Magazine – Then came 2020. “…Since the early 1990s,the portion of votes cast by mail has nosed upward in every presidential-election cycle, hitting an all-time high in 2016: 24 percent, or about 33 million ballots. But the national numbers mask a state-by-state variance. As a rule, voting by mail dominates the western states, while the East typically prefers to vote in person. In the 2018 midterms, returned mail-in ballots accounted for 2 percent of turnout in Arkansas and Kentucky, 4 percent in Pennsylvania and New York, but 66 percent in California, 95 percent in Colorado, and 100 percent in Oregon. But the state numbers mask another wild variance: that between counties. The United States has no centralized election system. Instead, the job of executing the fundamental transaction in our democracy falls to officials in our 3,100 counties. There’s an individualist, states’ rights spirit to the fracturedness, that old American disinclination to let Washington call the shots. McDonald’s menus are more consistent across county lines than voting technologies are. In the absence of federal directives, election officials have to shop for every component they need. To run a vote-by-mail election, a county sources two kinds of technology: outbound and inbound. Outbound, which Runbeck handles, is the ballot that goes to the voter. Inbound is what the voter sends back. Outbound requires making something. Inbound requires counting. There are multiple vendors in each category, hundreds of possible combinations. There are the conglomerate players and independents and family outfits, all in competition for similar contracts. In outbound, there’s Runbeck’s main western rival, K&H, in Washington: the biggest ballot printer in the country by volume. There’s the smaller Bradford & Bigelow, in Massachusetts. There’s Magnolia, in Florida; Midwest Direct, in Ohio. Some printers exclusively do ballots, and some do ballots and other commercial products. Cathedral, in upstate New York, earns about 25 percent of its revenue by printing offering envelopes for churches (the technology transfers to ballots because offering envelopes often need to be personalized, with a thank-you for the previous year’s donation)…”

The United States has no centralized election system. Instead, the job of executing the fundamental transaction in our democracy falls to officials in our 3,100 counties…”