DEMOCRATS CLASH WITH TRUMP OVER VOTING CHANGES
Republicans resist efforts to adjust for coronavirus
WASHINGTON
A showdown is taking shape in Congress over how far Washington should go in expanding voting access to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, with Democrats pressing to add new options for voters and President Donald Trump and Republicans resisting changes they say could harm their election prospects in November.
Democrats are determined to add new voting requirements for November’s general election to the next stage of coronavirus relief legislation, a move that Trump and Republican leaders have vowed to oppose. But it is one that Democrats believe is necessary and all the more urgent in light of the confusion and court fights surrounding Wisconsin’s elections Tuesday.
With public health officials encouraging social distancing and staying at home to slow the spread of the virus, the prospect of millions of voters congregating at polling places around the country to cast their ballots this fall appears increasingly untenable and dangerous. But the fight over whether the federal government should require states to offer other options — by allowing voting by mail, extending early voting and instituting other changes to protect voters and voting rights — is emerging as a major sticking point as lawmakers look to pass a fourth emergency aid measure in the next few weeks.
Democrats argue that changes are imperative, and Congress must make them now before it will be too late to put them in place for the November balloting.
“We can’t allow our democracy to go down the tubes because this administration did not prepare for this pandemic,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-minn., the ranking member on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees election law. “We have to come up with best practices and make sure that everyone can still vote.”
Trump, who in recent days has been ratcheting up his criticism of voting by mail, intensified his resistance Wednesday, instructing Republicans in a tweet to “fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting” and saying it “doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” He also claimed there was “tremendous potential for voter fraud,” though there is little evidence to back up that assertion.
Elections experts say voter fraud in general is extremely rare, including fraud involving ballots mailed in by voters. Most mail-ballot fraud involves absentee ballots and is committed by corrupt campaigns or election officials, not voters — and even that is rare and generally easily caught. (Trump conceded Tuesday that he voted by mail in Florida’s primary election in March.)
Still, the president made it clear last month that he regarded Democrats’ efforts to include broader voting access in the stimulus measure as a direct threat to Republicans’ electoral prospects. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said then.
Voting by mail, which has been shown to increase turnout, is routine in many parts of the country and is the chief way of voting in states such as Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Yet some Republicans, taking their cues from Trump, have become increasingly open in making the argument that it is detrimental to their party’s political fortunes.
In an interview with a local call-in show, David Ralston, the Republican speaker of Georgia’s state House, said a proposed vote-by-mail option for the state’s May primary would be a disaster for his party, explaining that the president had said it best.
“This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia,” Ralston said. “This will certainly drive up turnout.”
Other Republicans say their opposition to Democrats’ proposals is driven by a belief that states should control their own elections and that, beyond providing sufficient money to conduct safe and fair voting, the federal government should stay out of their way.
“I’m philosophically opposed to the federal government taking over elections,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-MO., the chairman of the Rules Committee and a longtime state elections official himself. “It is a bad idea. I’m pretty flexible about the amount of money, but I’m not flexible about a federal takeover of the election process itself.”
Hulse writes for The New York Times.