The cynical case against mail voting
California has a plan to help people vote safely this fall using a technology that is far from newfangled: the mail. It nevertheless drew not one but three frivolous lawsuits, all of which found their way to the legal equivalent of the dead letter office.
The Republicanbacked lawsuits portrayed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent orders to send mailin ballots to every registered voter, which cooler heads might view as a routine piece of pandemicera housekeeping, as a powermad usurpation of legislative prerogatives. But as the governor and legislative leaders made plain, the order was effectively a stopgap awaiting legislation to the same effect. Newsom signed that legislation, passed with supermajorities including 10 Republicans, last month, rendering the lawsuits largely moot.
Darrell Issa, the once and wouldbe future Republican congressman from Southern California, at least had the discretion to drop his suit quietly last week. Meanwhile, a state appellate court overturned a ruling blocking Newsom’s order in a case brought by two Republican legislators, taking such a dim view of their rush to court as to require them to compensate the state for costs. The Republican National Committee, which joined the National Republican Congressional Committee and California Republicans in yet another lawsuit, was the only plaintiff creative enough to drop its doomed case while declaring “a significant victory for California voters.”
But the party’s war on mailin ballots, which encompasses legal action to make remote voting more difficult in 13 other states, shows no regard for voters here or anywhere else. Rather, the goal is to force more Americans to choose between their health and their franchise on the theory that lower turnout favors Republicans. President Trump acknowledged as much in March, when he worried that Congress’ proposal to ease absentee balloting would induce such “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Not content to oppose voting by mail, the president is attacking the mail itself, calling the U.S. Postal Service a “joke” and demanding steep rate increases as the agency grapples with a fiscal crisis. The new postmaster general, a top Trump donor, announced procedural changes this week that could hamper delivery just as Americans have become especially dependent on the mail for voting and more.
It’s probably not a coincidence that slow delivery is one of the chief obstacles to voting by mail. A recent National Public Radio analysis found that more than 65,000 primary ballots were rejected this spring for arriving too late, “often through no fault of the voter.” Even in California, which took extraordinary steps to facilitate voting by mail before the pandemic struck, the Associated Press found that more than 100,000 primary ballots, or about 1.5% of the total cast, were rejected for a variety of reasons; they included more than 9,000, or 5% of the total, in San Francisco. Most were either postmarked or delivered after the deadline.
Such figures do little to support the conspiracy theory that mail voting lacks barriers against fraudulent voting. On the contrary, state and local officials have more work to do to ensure that every eligible vote counts.