Made a Mistake on Your Mail-In Ballot? Advocates Are Pushing States to Let You Correct It

Maria Fallon Romo has voted all her life. It’s important to her, and it was important to her when she cast her mail-in ballot for then-Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota’s 2018 midterm elections.

So Romo was stunned when, in the spring of 2020, the bipartisan Campaign Legal Center informed her that her vote had never been counted. Her ballot was rejected when election officials ruled that the signature on her ballot didn’t match the signature on her absentee ballot request form.

Romo, 54, has fought multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, a disease which, among other symptoms, numbs her hands and fingers and impacts her handwriting. “I didn’t know my vote didn’t count, and that was an important election to me,” Ramo says. “I should have been notified.”

Romo was a plaintiff in a suit brought in the spring by the Campaign Legal Center against North Dakota’s signature matching laws, which resulted in a federal judge ruling in June that the state must adopt a “notice and cure” process. Now, state election officials must notify voters if their mail-in ballots are deemed invalid and give them opportunity to correct—or “cure”—the problem in time for their vote to be counted. In his opinion, the judge ruled that “attempting to contact voters and allowing an opportunity to verify ballots” met “the bare-minimum requirements of procedural due process.”

As an unprecedented number of voters turn to voting by mail amid the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more states are adopting “notice and cure” processes. Eighteen states already had some type of cure process before the pandemic, and at least 11 more will have a new system in place by Nov. 3, according to the advocacy organization The Voting Rights Lab (VRL). In the run-up to the polls, voting rights groups have filed over a dozen lawsuits across the U.S. pushing states to adopt these cure systems. Some legal battles are still ongoing, including in the key swing state of North Carolina, where a recent ruling from a federal judge provided some clarity on a cure process for more than more than 6,800 votes—many from voters of color—that have been in limbo.

Whether or not additional states adopt cure processes could determine if hundreds of thousands of ballots are counted this election. Roughly 318,700 mail-in ballots were rejected in the 2016 general election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and a recent NPR analysis found that more than 550,000 were rejected in this year’s presidential primaries. As millions of voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail for the first time, experts worry an unprecedented number of ballots could be disqualified this cycle. Research has found that first-time mail-in voters are up to three times more likely to have their ballot rejected compared to experienced mail-in voters. Studies also show that people of color and young people are more likely to have their ballots rejected.

Enter “notice and cure” processes, which advocates argue are an essential part of any vote-by-mail system that help protect voters’ rights to due process. “Notice and cure” processes require that voters be informed if their ballot has been rejected, and gives voters a chance to correct any mistake they may have made. “It’s very, very important — understanding that these are the dynamics of the election — that we put something in place that actually allows people to preserve their vote,” says Celina Stewart, chief counsel and senior director of advocacy and litigation at the League of Women Voters, which has won several lawsuits requiring states to implement cure processes.

“Just as we are making changes to our election laws… to account for COVID, we also need to account for first-time voters or people using this avenue for the first time,” argues Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the advocacy organization Common Cause.

Here’s what to know about correcting mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.

What causes mail-in ballots to be disqualified?

This varies widely, depending on how strict a state’s vote-by-mail laws are. Voting by mail can be confusing, especially for voters who haven’t done it before.

“Many states have arcane technical requirements that aren’t communicated well,” explains Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT. Some states, such as Missouri, require voters to notarize their mail-in ballots; others require at least one adult witness to sign the ballot. Some states, like New Hampshire, require voters to place their ballot in a “secrecy sleeve” that goes inside the pre-addressed envelope provided. Kentucky requires voters to also sign said sleeve. Failure to complete any of these tasks could result in a ballot being disqualified. (The ACLU has a guide on each state’s vote-by-mail requirements.)

Ballots can also be disqualified due to signature mismatch. At least 31 states use signature matching to verify absentee ballots, per the Campaign Legal Center, meaning they compare the signature on a voter’s ballot to the signature the Board of Elections has on file or the signature on the absentee ballot request form. The mechanics of this process can vary across—and even within—states. Some jurisdictions use computers for a first round of checking, while others leave the process up to the discretion of local election officials, says Barry Burden, a professor of political science and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I think there are real concerns about the quality of the process and exactly what signatures the state has on file to compare against,” says Burden. Many voters’ signatures were taken at the DMV on digital signing pads, which are notoriously glitchy. Some signatures are old, and could have been taken 20 years ago when a person first registered to vote.

Signature rejections are also “not distributed equally across the population,” Burden says. According to the Campaign Legal Center, voters with disabilities, non-native English speakers, racial minorities and the elderly are more likely to have ballots rejected because of signature match issues. Studies also show that young people—who on average don’t have as reliable signatures—are also more likely to have their ballots rejected because of a mismatched signature.

That’s what happened to 20-year-old Isabelle Halbe-Sauer, who voted for the first time in the 2018 Arizona midterms. She cast her ballot by mail while attending Arizona State University, and shortly afterwards received a call from an elections official notifying her that her signatures didn’t match and asked her to verify her identity, which she did. Like many young people, Halbe-Sauer says she has “never had a very consistent signature.”

But signature mismatch can also impact more experienced voters, such as former Florida Rep. Patrick E. Murphy. During the 2018 Florida midterms, Murphy saw on the news that ballots weren’t being counted because of signature mismatch and went online to check the status of his mail-in ballot. Sure enough, he saw it was labeled invalid. He was shocked. “I’ve had the same signature since I was 16,” he says. Murphy ended up curing his ballot by going in-person to the county elections office and signing an affidavit, but was alarmed it could have been disqualified. “There’s got to be a better way to do this, a better way to make sure your vote counts,” he says.

How can voters fix mistakes on mail-in ballots?

This also depends on the state. In a state with a “notice and cure” process, voters should be notified by a local elections official if there’s an issue with their ballot. (Here is The Voting Rights Lab’s list of states with cure processes.)

The way voters are notified depends on what information the state has on file. Some states require voters to provide a phone number or email. (Arizona, for example, allows voters to sign up for text message alerts.) Others only have voters’ physical addresses and send letters by mail notifying them of the issue.

How ballots are cured also varies state to state. Some states simply let voters know their ballots were rejected and ask them to cast a new one. Others ask voters to provide evidence of their identity, sometimes requiring them to come in-person to the county elections office, to validate the ballot.

“There’s no uniform standard across the country on how this is done,” says Stewart of the League of Women Voters. “There is a lot of levity given to board of elections officials, from secretaries of states, on how to handle it based on their particular jurisdiction and what works in that particular jurisdiction.”

The most effective curing systems give voters ample time to fix the problem once they’ve been notified, says Sophia Lakin, the deputy director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In Illinois, for example, voters have until 14 days after the election to fix an issue with a ballot.

But many states don’t give voters that much time. Florida, for example, allows voters to cure a ballot up to 46 hours after the election. In those tight windows, if a voter doesn’t provide a phone number or email address with their ballot and returns their envelope on Election Day, it would be extremely difficult to be notified by mail in time to fix the ballot, explains Daniel A. Smith, a professor and chair of political science at the University of Florida. To be safe, advocates urge voters to cast their mail-in ballots as soon as possible to provide plenty of time for any potential problems to be flagged and fixed.

After Laura Jantzen voted by mail in Montana in 2016, she says she was notified that she needed to go to the county elections office and cure her ballot because of a signature issue. She was able to quickly get there before the deadline on Election Day. But, the 37-year-old says, while she found the process to be straightforward, it would have been harder if she had less flexible work hours, or needed to find childcare. “If I was in a different situation, which I know many voters are, I could see that process as being a lot more challenging and potentially not doable,” she says.

What happens in states that don’t have a “cure” process?

In states without a “notice and cure” process, if a ballot is disqualified, it will likely be thrown out, sometimes without the voter’s knowledge. But even in these states, there are some steps for voters to take to protect against this.

While 21 states still don’t have state-wide cure processes, some individual jurisdictions have taken it upon themselves to implement their own system, so voters should check with their local officials to see what’s available in their area, recommends Megan Lewis, the executive director of Voting Rights Lab.

For voters living in one of the many states that allows them to track mail-in ballots, advocates recommend they track it every step of the way to see if their ballot was flagged as having an issue. If that happens, a voter can call their local election officials to see if there’s any way to fix it, or potentially spoil, or throw out, that ballot and cast a new one, adds Stewart of the League of Women Voters.

Is the movement to push for more states to adopt a “cure” process making progress?

Over the past several years political and legal pressure has driven more and more states to adopt cure systems. This year alone, advocates have filed at least 18 lawsuits to force states to implement cure systems before the general election, according to a tally by Loyola Law School Professor Justin Levitt. In general, “the courts have decided in favor of cure,” says Stewart of MIT.

Traditional absentee ballot law operated under the legal theory that absentee ballots are a convenience and not a right, and for that reason, “all of the risk of voting an absentee ballot was born by the voter,” says Stewart. Under that reasoning, the state could impose restrictions and it’d be up to the voter to adhere to them. But as more states have moved to vote by mail systems—especially given the constraints of the pandemic—that theory has weakened, says Stewart.

Most of lawsuits filed this year argue that denying voters the opportunity to correct problems with their ballots deprives them of their right to due process, especially in the instance of signature mismatch, which is often so subjective. Over the past several months at least six federal district courts—North Dakota, North Carolina, Indiana, Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey—have ruled in agreement.

But several states’ cure processes are still wrapped up in legal battles, so advocates recommend voters check with their local election officials for the latest developments, and proactively check the status of their ballots throughout the process of voting if they can. As Stewart put it, “don’t make any assumptions about whether your ballot is going to be going to be approved.”

It can take perseverance. Miltrine Jenkins Barden has been voting since she was 18, since she marched in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and went to jail for three days for the right to cast a ballot. But the 74-year-old had never voted by mail until September, when she filled out her first mail-in ballot from her Greensboro, N.C., home out of concern about the COVID-19 pandemic.

A few days later, Barden says she received a call from the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Voter Assistance Hotline informing her that her ballot had been marked invalid because she’d left off a required witness signature. (Barden says she thought the signature was only required if you needed assistance filling out a ballot.) She says she was told the Board of Elections would send instructions on a “cure certification” process, but instructions never came. She later found out her ballot was one of thousands that were in limbo as the legal battle over North Carolina’s cure process continued to play out.

After repeatedly calling her local Board of Elections, Barden eventually decided to “spoil,” or throw out, her original ballot and cast a new one. Barden says she’s frustrated that the process wasn’t easier. “There should not be any kind of obstruction,” she says. “It is our right and our privilege to vote.”

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‘A Perfect Storm.’ The Michigan Plot Lays Bare the Dangers of Ignoring the Far-Right Threat

For two decades, U.S. terrorism efforts were almost exclusively fixed on disrupting plots masterminded by jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. The federal government built a globe-spanning surveillance and intelligence network to keep tabs on their leaders and foot soldiers. Federal agents obtained sweeping authorities to investigate suspects with even the slightest link to foreign terrorist organizations.

All the while, the threat posed by homegrown far-right extremists deepened. Groups operated in the shadows, spreading hate-filled messages and amassing unlikely followers as social media use soared. Right-wing and white nationalist terrorist attacks spiked, killing twice as many Americans in domestic terror attacks than radical Islamists have since 9/11.

Last week, there was a sign that the federal government’s priorities may finally be shifting to meet that reality. On Thursday, federal and state authorities revealed a high-profile bust of an elaborate scheme to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer, resulting in the arrest of 13 people linked with a local rightwing militia group.

The foiled plot, which was outlined in a detailed sworn affidavit, showed a deeply resourced case built on a network of confidential informants, recorded conversations, social media posts and intercepted text messages. It’s a concentration of law enforcement effort and coordination rarely seen in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, which drove the government’s focus away from white supremacists, anti-government militias and other like-minded groups to Islamic terrorist organizations.

Ryan Garza—USA Today Network/Sipa USAA Three Percenter flag and a Gadsden Flag fly onthe home of Michael Null in Plainwell, Mich., on October 9, 2020. Null one of 13 suspects accused of plotting to abduct and possibly harm Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“There has been a disturbing increase in anti-government rhetoric and the re-emergence of groups that embrace extremist ideologies,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told reporters after sharing the details of the affidavit. “These groups often seek to recruit new members by seizing on a moment of civil unrest and using it to advance their agenda of self-reliance and armed resistance. This is more than just political disagreement or passionate advocacy. Some of these groups’ mission is simply to create chaos and inflict harm upon others.”

This year has not been short on feelings of uncertainty and frustration for extremist groups to capitalize on. The COVID-19 lockdowns, the protests over racial justice, and the 2020 election are a lightning rod for the more radical elements of many of these groups that may resort to violence, says Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer at Vanderbilt University who has spent more than a decade tracking and studying militias, including the Wolverine Watchmen militia that was plotting to kidnap Whitmer.

“It’s a perfect storm of factors right now,” says Cooter. “A lot of people underestimate the extent to which these groups are a barometer for feelings a lot of middle America has, and to think of them as so ‘out there’ is ignoring that they’re indicative of broader trends.”

On Oct. 6, two days before the news of the Whitmer plot emerged, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued its first-ever “Homeland Threat Assessment” that said far-right extremists pose the largest threat to the U.S. homeland, other than adversarial nation-states. The 26-page document ominously warned that domestic extremists “might target events related to the 2020 Presidential campaigns, the election itself, election results, or the post-election period” and that they “could mobilize quickly to threaten or engage in violence.” It identified open-air events, “such as campaign- associated mass gatherings, polling places, and voter registration event” as “the most likely flash points for potential violence.”

It was an unusually pointed statement by DHS, which under the Trump Administration has been pressured to downplay the threat posed by right-wing and white supremacist groups, according to former intelligence officials and whistleblowers. In recent years, the FBI also has not prioritized white-supremacist violence even among homegrown threats, listing “eco-terrorism” as the top risk, former special agent Michael German told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in May 2019.

Now that agency is tracking far-right extremism closely as well. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in September the agency recorded about 120 arrests on domestic terrorism suspicions this year. He identified white supremacists and far-right groups as primary threats, and pointed to “perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach” as one of the drivers of domestic violent extremism in the country. Last year, domestic violent extremists killed 39 people in five separate attacks, according to the FBI, making it the deadliest year for domestic violent extremism since 1995, in which the Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people.

To respond to this new threat, the FBI recently coined a new term, “domestic violent extremist,” people who are radicalized by socio-political conditions, racism, and anti-Semitism, as opposed to “homeland violent extremist,” who are global jihad-inspired. Last year, the agency established the Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell that pursues racially motivated violent extremists.

Kent County Sheriff’s Office/AFPThis grid of pictures shows booking photos released by the Antrim County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan (L-R, top to bottom) Michael Null, William Null, Eric Molitor, and Shawn Fix and images released by the Kent County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan, Ty Garbin, Brandon Caserta, Kaleb Franks, Adam Fox, and Daniel Harris. All are suspects have been arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and “instigate a civil war”, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on October 8, 2020.

The FBI had been tracking the Michigan militia group since at least March. At that time, the agency said the extremists attempted to obtain a list of local law enforcement officers’ home addresses so they could attack or kill them. The effort to kidnap Whitmer got underway in June, when a meeting of Michigan militia members discussed overthrowing state governments “that they believed were violating the U.S. Constitution” by taking away their rights through lockdowns and quarantines, according to an undercover law enforcement source who attended the meeting.

A plot evolved among the group members to transport her to Wisconsin and put her on trial for “treason,” as part of a broader plot to overthrow the government, according to the sworn FBI affidavit. The militia members also complained about state laws and COVID-19 restrictions, specifically mentioning the safety measures on gyms.

In their conversations, the men also discussed “taking” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, FBI agent Richard Trask testified to the U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids on Tuesday. They expressed similar anger about the COVID-19 measures that Northam, like Whitmer, had implemented in his state earlier this year.

The FBI’s case lays out how the Wolverine Watchmen suspects were part of a broader set of self-proclaimed militia members who got together on online platforms to talk about targeting government officials. “They discussed possible targets, taking a sitting governor, specifically governors of Michigan and Virginia, over shut down orders,” Trask testified. “The understanding at the time was to potentially kidnap a sitting governor and remove them from office.”

One of the men charged, Adam Fox, told the group that he needed 200 men to storm the Michigan state Capitol and take hostages, according to the FBI. This plot was meant to take place before the Nov. 3 election, according to federal agents. “Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” according to the document. At least four of the 13 suspects had attended rallies at the Michigan Capitol earlier in the year, according to law enforcement and local news reports. Michael and William Null, twin brothers and militia members who have been charged in the kidnapping plot, carried firearms as they demonstrated against Whitmer’s COVID-19 restrictions on the Capitol steps in late April, according to Michigan officials.

It echoed, almost verbatim, the warning outlined in the DHS’ “Homeland Threat Assessment.” The agency noted it was “particularly concerned about the impacts from COVID-19 where anti-government and anti-authority violent extremists could be motivated to conduct attacks in response to perceived infringement of liberties and government overreach as all levels of government seek to limit the spread of the coronavirus that has caused a worldwide pandemic.”

The recent statements by DHS and the FBI show how far the threat of domestic extremism – and its acknowledgment by law enforcement – had evolved in the past decade. In 2009, an internal DHS report that noted the rise in “rightwing extremism” and urged local law enforcement to study these groups to better understand their ideology caused a massive backlash when it was leaked to conservative media. Several Republicans in Congress pushed to have it withdrawn, calling it an attack on conservatives, and even called for then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s resignation. DHS ultimately rescinded it and Napolitano apologized.

Not long after the DHS report was released, in the summer of 2009, attendance at Michigan militia events doubled, according to an assessment by Cooter. This growth was fueled by unrest over the Iraq War, the global economic recession and the election of the country’s first black president. But it took another decade before federal law enforcement agencies began to define the threat posed by homegrown far-right extremism in stark terms. By then, social media platforms had made it increasingly easy for many of these groups to recruit and organize online.

“What’s disturbing is the scope of it — most militia plots are two, three, four people living in the same proximity,” said Daryl Johnson, a former DHS senior analyst who authored the 2009 report warning of the rise of right-wing extremism. “Here you’ve got a ring of at least 13 people in multiple states, it shows how much these groups have proliferated.”

Ryan Garza—USA Today/ NetworkSipa USAA wall recently constructed outside of the home of William Null in Shelbyville, Mich., Oct. 9, 2020. Null is one of 13 suspects accused of plotting to abduct Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Though militia groups have traditionally harbored anti-government stances, many militia members have been won over by President Donald Trump’s messaging, and have more recently focused their anger toward Democrat political leaders in particular. This past summer, militia activity was more visible across the country as armed pro-Trump “patriot groups” appeared at protests in Louisville, Gettysburg and Portland, raising concerns from government officials and civil right groups about where else they might appear when Americans head to the polls for the presidential election on Nov. 3.

“There has to be heavy penetration of these extremist groups to catch people before they attack,” Seth Jones, a former U.S. counterterrorism official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s going to be difficult because, unlike the Islamic State or al-Qaeda as organizations, they’re very decentralized. So it just makes it really hard for the joint terrorism task forces, which have this responsibility across the U.S., to do this.”

The recent public shift by DHS and other agencies outline the threat posed by American far-right extremists may be too little, too late, says Johnson, the former DHS analyst.

“Year after year the attacks kept mounting, and now in 2020 they’re finally acknowledging it [but] I’m concerned we may be at the point of no return,” he tells TIME. “The momentum and the factors that are fueling these movements are overwhelmingly strong and it’s gonna take a hell of an effort over many years to stem the tide.”

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History Shows America Benefits From Transparency About the President’s Health. Too Bad That’s So Rare

In the 1993 romcom Dave, the President of the United States suffers a stroke while in flagrante delicto. His chief of staff, attempting to seize power from the comatose President, finds a POTUS doppelganger, the titular Dave. A principled mensch, Dave bucks the malevolent chief of staff and promotes his own policies to help the masses whence he hails. Meanwhile, the President remains on life support in a secure room on the White House’s third floor.

Dave is obviously not a documentary—but it’s accurate in at least one aspect: throughout American history, Presidents who have suffered health crises, even in the mass media era, have tended to conceal what’s occurring. The unprecedented Trump Presidency, made more surreal with his being whisked to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday after a COVID-19 diagnosis, as he tries to assure the nation in a Twitter video that he thinks he is “doing very well,” proves that this is the rare Presidential norm that Trump is ready to follow. However, history also shows just how much the public can benefit from transparency about Presidential health.

Secrecy about Presidential health starts in the nation’s early years, and has included such extremes as President Grover Cleveland having cancer surgery on a boat to avoid detection. Not even a deadly pandemic has been enough to induce deviation from that unwritten rule. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson contracted what many historians believe to have been the so-called Spanish flu; he took to his bed, fevered and delirious, at the Versailles Treaty negotiations in Paris. After recovering, he returned to the U.S. and undertook a draining and unsuccessful whistle-stop tour around the nation to promote the treaty. When he suffered a debilitating stroke once back at the White House, though he never recovered from its paralytic effects, the First Lady and his physicians insisted on maintaining secrecy about Wilson’s condition.

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Franklin Roosevelt, a paraplegic polio survivor, ran for a fourth term in 1944 despite an unrevealed congestive heart failure diagnosis. The electorate witnessed his decline, but he countered it with an open-car parade through New York City, and a speech at Ebbets Field, in a cold rain. He won the election but succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage barely three months after the inauguration. Most Americans were shocked because they hadn’t realized the severity of his illness. Roosevelt’s widow Eleanor recalled in her post-White House memoir that “we were all so unwilling to acknowledge” her husband’s illness as he reached the end of his life.

In 1960, both presidential candidates faced infirmity. Incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon suffered a leg wound, which became infected, requiring a three-week hospitalization and absence from the hustings in late August and early September. He lost 15 pounds during treatment, and then contracted the flu after he went back to the campaign trail. Unable to keep his illness a secret, he suffered from its effects in public, and his haggard appearance contributed to his loss in the first debate to Senator John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, JFK’s rival for the nomination, Senator Lyndon Johnson, spread the word at the convention that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, but JFK’s camp denied the story. The 43-year-old took steroids to treat his adrenal insufficiency and cultivated a vigorous public image. The ruse worked. Kennedy defeated Nixon and never admitted that he had a potentially fatal malady.

From these examples, politicians would seem to have ample historical reasons for keeping their illnesses concealed. But doing so can backfire; for instance, though the Hillary Clinton campaign initially kept quiet when the candidate came down with pneumonia in 2016, camera phones captured her knees buckling after a 9/11 commemoration event, and candidate Trump pounced. In addition to questioning her health, he accused his opponent of keeping her condition secret.

And transparency about Presidential health serves the nation’s best interest. Case in point: Dwight Eisenhower, who experienced severe medical crises during his presidency, conducted the most transparent administration regarding his health. He suffered a massive heart attack in 1955 that hospitalized him for seven weeks in Denver, and he underwent serious abdominal surgery in the summer before his 1956 re-election. In both instances, he ordered his press secretary and physicians to give detailed daily briefings on his condition. His three-decade military career trained him to focus on facts and forthrightness, especially in matters of life and death.

Eisenhower’s ailments did not derail his political career. To the contrary, he was re-elected to the presidency just months after his ileitis operation, and Ike’s already high approval ratings spiked further as Americans wished him well. His candor about his heart condition has also been credited with educating people across the country about cardiac health and how to maintain it. With the President’s blessing, his team used his condition as a starting point to speak to the public about the disease’s realities—and it worked. Historians cite the episode as sparking a new national interest in physical fitness, which JFK continued. Moreover, Eisenhower’s own brush with mortality and disability prompted him to advocate a presidential succession plan that culminated in the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which established procedures for when a President is unable to perform his duties.

Americans want the truth about their Presidents’—and aspiring Presidents’— fitness. Dave may tell a story in which a chief executive’s health secrets end up accidentally benefiting the country, but history reveals just the opposite: the public not only deserves to know about the health of the person in the Oval Office, but can also benefit long-term from that knowledge. Previously, the U.S. has only achieved those advantages when individual Presidents resist the norm, but perhaps President Trump’s affliction will push Congress to learn from the past and, in the future, make transparency a requirement.

Historians’ perspectives on how the past informs the present

Barbara A. Perry is Gerald L. Baliles Professor and Presidential Studies Director at UVA’s Miller Center.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Died. She Leaves Behind a Vital Legacy for Women — and Men

On March 15, 2019, legions of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s admirers celebrated her 86th birthday by dropping to the ground and grinding out the Super Diva’s signature push-ups on the steps of courthouses around the country.

This unusual tribute to a Supreme Court justice was one of the many ways a new generation has shown the love to the five-foot tall legal giant who made the lives they live possible. But by Sept. 18, her iron will and gritty determination was no longer enough to propel her to court. Ginsburg died on Friday at the age of 87 of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court, per the Associated Press.

In the early ’70s—when Gloria Steinem was working underground as a Playboy Bunny to expose sexism, and Betty Friedan was writing a feminist manifesto about “the problem with no name”—Ginsburg named the problem, briefed it, and argued it before the Supreme Court of the United States.

She was 37 then, on the receiving end of so much of the discrimination she would work to end, and she was just undertaking her first job as a litigator—as co-director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. In her “very precise” way, as Justice Harry Blackmun put it, she studied title, chapter, clause, and footnote of the legal canon that kept women down and overturned those that discriminated on the basis of sex in five landmark cases that extended the 14th Amendment’s equal rights clause to women. In that long, hard slog, she employed some novel devices, using “gender” (so as not to distract male jurists with the word “sex”) and representing harmed male plaintiffs when she could find one (to show that discrimination hurts everyone). And she never raised her voice.

When she was done, a widower could get the same Social Security benefits as a woman and a woman could claim the same military housing allowance as a man. A woman could cut a man’s hair, buy a drink at the same age, administer an estate, and serve on a jury.

By the time she left the ACLU, and before she donned her first black robe, Ginsburg had brought about a small revolution in how women were treated, wiping close to 200 laws that discriminated off the books. Over the next decades, first as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and then as the second woman on the Supreme Court, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she would become to women what Thurgood Marshall was to African Americans. She employed the same clause in the 14th Amendment he used to free former slaves to extend protection to the mentally ill who wanted to live outside institutions, gays who wanted to marry, immigrants who lived in fear, and, of course, females: those who wanted to be cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, have access to abortion, and, when pregnant, not be fired if they couldn’t perform duties their condition made, temporarily, impossible.

Her fans’ courthouse celebration was also a plea for the bionic Ginsburg to carry on, at least until the 2020 election. There was high anxiety when she fell asleep at the State of the Union in 2015 (a case of enjoying a fine California wine brought by Justice Anthony Kennedy to the justices pre-speech dinner) and even more when she missed the court’s 2019 opening session in January, her first such absence in 26 years. She hadn’t fully recovered from surgery to remove three cancerous nodules from her lungs. But she took her seat as the senior justice next to Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-February, picking up her full caseload. That following summer, she went through radiation to treat a cancerous tumor on her pancreas, her fourth brush with cancer. In July 2020, she announced that cancer had returned yet again. Despite receiving chemotherapy for lesions on her liver, the 87-year-old reasserted that she was still “fully able” to continue serving on the Supreme Court.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesAugust 2, 1935 Childhood photograph of Ruth Bader taken when she was two years old.

Baton-twirling bookworm

Joan Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in Brooklyn and came of age during the Holocaust, “a first-generation American on my father’s side, barely second-generation on my mother’s … What has become of me could happen only in America,” she said at her confirmation hearing.

True enough, but what would become of her was a long time coming. In an enthralling biography, Jane Sherron De Hart describes schoolgirl Ruth, who twirled a baton but was such a bookworm she tripped and broke her nose reading while walking. Her mother, who convinced her she could do anything, died just before Ruth, the class valedictorian, graduated and headed off to Cornell. There she met the tall, handsome Martin Ginsburg, and married him the minute she graduated Phi Beta Kappa—the first person, she said, who “loved me for my brain.” She’d been accepted to Harvard Law, where Marty was already enrolled. She calls “meeting Marty by far the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me.”

What happened next is proof of her maxim that “a woman can have it all, just not all at once.” Marty was called up to active duty, so instead of studying torts in Cambridge, Ginsburg found herself working as a claims examiner at the Social Security Administration in Fort Sill, Oklahoma—that is, until she was demoted with a pay cut for working while pregnant.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesSummer 1958 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg play with their three-year old daughter, Jane, in her bedroom at Martin’s parents’ home in Rockville Centre, N.Y

Life threw another wrench into the works when both were back at Harvard with a baby girl, and Marty was stricken with a rare testicular cancer. Ruth went to class for both of them, typing up his notes and papers as well as her own, getting along on even less sleep than your usual new mother, all while being scolded for taking up a man’s seat by Dean Erwin Grisold. When her husband graduated and was offered a prestigious job at a white shoe law firm in New York, she gave up her last year at Harvard to finish at Columbia.

Once again, she felt the sting of the discrimination. Despite being the first student ever to serve on both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews and graduating at the top of her class, she couldn’t get a job at a premier law firm or one of the Supreme Court clerkships that went so easily to male classmates who ranked below her. According to DeHart, Judge Felix Frankfurter fretted a woman clerk might wear pants to chambers. Without bitterness, she calls anger a useless emotion; she noted that in the ’50s, “to be a woman, a Jew and a mother to boot—that combination was a bit too much.”

Librado Romero—The New York Times/Redux 1972 Ruth Bader Ginsburg in New York, when she was named a professor at Columbia Law School.

Battling discrimination

She didn’t get outwardly angry and only, after many years, got even. She took a lower court clerkship, researched civil procedure (and equality of the sexes in practice) in Sweden and wrote a book on the subject—in Swedish! She returned home to teach at the Newark campus of Rutgers Law, where she co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter. Despite being a progressive school, discrimination struck again. She learned she didn’t earn the same as a male colleague because, the dean explained, “he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York.” No wonder then, when she found herself surprisingly (given her husband’s medical history) but happily pregnant again, she took no chances and hid it.

After the birth of her son, James, she became a tenured professor at Columbia, co-authored the first case book on discrimination law, a work in progress as she changed much of it while litigating for the ACLU, until in 1980 she joined the Court of Appeals.

Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton was elected and he wanted a Cabinet, and by extension a Supreme Court, that looked like America. Ginsburg was on the list, but so were a dozen others and she wasn’t at the top.

Even Clinton’s deliberations weren’t without a peculiar form of discrimination as he worried, “the women are against her.” He was right. To the feminists of the ’90s—who might be ignored by the White House if it weren’t for Ginsburg’s decades of opening doors—she was yesterday. The judge methodically chipping away at bias, without burning a bra or tossing a high heel, looked plodding and uninspiring; her friendship with her colleague on the district court, Scalia, looked suspect.

Enter Marty. “I wasn’t very good at promotion, but Marty was,” she told the late Gwen Ifill, a PBS anchor. “He was tireless”—and beloved among lawyers, professors, and politicians. Women came around, reminded that she was a pioneer in their fight to overcome the patriarchy and a steadfast supporter of abortion rights, despite acknowledging in an interview that the country might be politically better off if the states had continued to legalize abortion rather than have Roe v. Wade as a singular target of its foes. Ginsburg was confirmed 96 to 3.

Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States August 10, 1993 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. From left to right stand President Bill Clinton, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Ginsburg, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

David Hume Kennerly—Getty Images March 2001 The only two female Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, pose for a portrait in Statuary Hall, surrounded by statues of men at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. The two Justices were preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus.

The Great Dissenter

She didn’t disappoint. In one case after another, she asked the right questions (and usually the first one), cobbled together majorities and wrote elegantly reasoned opinions: striking down stricter requirements for abortion clinics designed to make the procedure extinct (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt), and approving gay marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), making the point during oral argument that if you can’t refuse a 70-year-old couple marriage because they can’t procreate, how could you use that excuse to deprive a gay one.

But it was her minority — not her majority — opinions that made her beloved to a new generation of women. As the court tilted right in 2006 after the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Ginsburg started to read, not just file, her dissents to explain to the majority why they were wrong in hopes that “if the court has a blind spot today, its eyes will be open tomorrow.”

Here was a shy, understated incrementalist suddenly becoming the Great Dissenter. In Shelby County v. Holder, she said that relieving errant states of the close scrutiny of the Voting Rights Act was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In Hobby Lobby, she was aghast that the court would deny costly contraception coverage to working women “because of someone else’s religious beliefs.” In the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber equal pay case, she asked how her brethren could penalize the plaintiff, who only got evidence of the disparity from an anonymous note, for missing a 180-day filing deadline given that salaries are kept secret. One person whose eyes were opened was Barack Obama. His first piece of legislation in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Karsten Moran—ReduxA woman attending the New York City Women’s March wears a t-shirt ​featuring Supreme Court Justic​e Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Jan. 20, 2018.

Becoming the Notorious RBG

Ginsburg’s womansplaining caught the attention of New York University law student Shana Knizhnik, who uploaded Ginsburg’s dissents to Tumblr. Overnight, a younger generation of women, and their mothers and grandmothers, were reminded of what Ginsburg had done for them. Knizhnik joined with reporter Irin Carmon to write Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The justice was soon a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, with a hyperkinetic Kate McKinnon issuing blistering “Ginsburns.” The justice’s 2016 memoir, My Own Words, was a New York Times bestseller. There were more books — adult, children’s and coloring. In 2018, Hollywood released a major motion picture, On the Basis of Sex, and the documentary RBG, which won an Emmy. Store shelves groan with merch: mugs (you Bader believe it), onesies (The Ruth will set you free), tote bags, bobblehead dolls, and action figures, one of the latest from her cameo in Lego Movie 2, produced by none other than Trump Administration Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

All this late-arriving fame rested uneasily on the shoulders of Ginsburg, who accepted it with dignity and took some pleasure at grandchildren’s shock that “so many people want to take my picture.” She kept a large supply of Notorious RBG T-shirts as a party favor for visitors.

At the heart of Hollywood’s treatment of Ginsburg wasn’t only the case Marty and his wife worked on together—an appeal of an IRS ruling—but a marriage of extraordinary compatibility and mutual support. After he recovered from cancer and had become a sought-after lawyer, he eagerly took on his share of domestic duties, which included feeding the children since, according to former Solicitor General Ted Olson, “Ruth wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the kitchen.” Marty was the fun parent (Ginsburg joked at her confirmation hearing that the children kept a log called “Mommy Laughed”) and a big-hearted host who happily roasted “Bambi,” Ruth’s name for whatever Scalia, her opera buddy, bagged on his last hunting trip. The pair were the subject of an actual comic opera, Scalia/Ginsburg, in which one scene depicts the over-emoting Scalia, locked in a dark room for excessive dissenting, and Ginsburg descending through a glass ceiling to rescue him.

A fellow justice said that neither Ginsburg would be who they were without the other. Marty once joked about being second banana: “As a general rule, my wife does not give me any advice about cooking and I do not give her any advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.” De Hart reprints the letter Marty put in a drawer in the bedside table as he was dying from a recurrence of his cancer. He was the “most fortunate” part of her life.

Marty lived to see his wife recognized beyond what the two imagined when they agreed to marry and be lawyers together, but died just before a slight she suffered for following him to New York was righted. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard Law that Dean Griswold had denied her for taking her last credits at Columbia.

The longer she lived, the wider her reach and the deeper the appreciation for her years on the bench. At the opening concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Sept. 2019, Kennedy Center chair David Rubinstein introduced the dignitaries in the audience. When he got to the justice, women rose to applaud her. Then, the men quickly joined in until everyone in the hall was standing, looking up at the balcony, cheering and whistling, as if they’d come to tell her that they knew what she had done for them, not to hear Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2.

This wasn’t an audience of liberals, but a cross-section of the capital touched by a once-young lawyer who saw unfairness and quietly tried to end it during her 60 years of public service.

Throughout the decades, Ginsburg quietly persisted—through discrimination she would seek to end, through the death of Marty, through more illness and debilitating treatments than any one person should have to endure—without complaint, holding on and out, until sheer will was no longer enough.

from TIME https://ift.tt/2RHBzbQ