Trump reverses his stance on voting by mail
President says it’s great for crucial swing state Florida
After months warning that voting by mail is riddled with fraud and would be used to rig the election against him, President Donald Trump suddenly reversed himself on Tuesday — at least as far as Florida is concerned.
Trump now says voting by mail in Florida is great.
“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” he wrote Tuesday afternoon on Twitter. “[I]n Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA.”
Trump’s about-face likely stems from self interest. Florida’s 29 electoral votes, more than a tenth of the 270 needed to win the presidency, are critical to his hopes for reelection.
Florida statewide elections are always exceedingly close. One reason Republicans win most statewide elections is that they have always urged their voters to vote by mail, and have often done better at Democrats in turning out mail voters.
Political implications
So the very thing Trump has been trashing could make the difference in whether he wins or loses in Florida — a state in which polling shows him trailing Democrat Joe Biden. Three high-quality Florida polls released last week show Biden leading Trump by an average of 4 percentage points.
In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won 49% of the vote statewide to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 47.8%. In that election, 1.1 million Florida Republicans cast mail ballots — 58,224 more than the 1 million mail ballots cast by Democrats. Trump defeated Clinton by 112,911 votes.
As of Tuesday morning, 1.9 million Democrats have requested mail ballots for 2020 elections, compared to 1.3 million Republicans.
Dave Aronberg, the Palm Beach County state attorney and former Democratic state senator, pointed to the difference in voter interest in mail ballots when he responded to Trump on Twitter.
“Could this reversal have something to do with the @FlaDems being up by more than 600,000 vote-by-mail requests in Florida? False attacks on vote-by-mail have backfired and now it’s cleanup on aisle 9.”
Steve Schale, a veteran Florida Democratic strategist and CEO of the proBiden super PAC Unite the Country, also reacted on Twitter that Trump’s attacks on mail voting amounted to “torching Republican confidence in vote by mail, and in the same fire, burning 25 years of investments to build up a [Republican vote by mail] machine.”
Helen Aguirre Ferré, executive director of the Florida Republican Party, said the president is in a good position in Florida.
“We have a great ground game and we have made thousands of knocks on doors and have reached out directly to voters to ensure that they are engaged,” she said. “We’re very confident. The enthusiasm for the president is continuing to grow.”
Many voters have expressed increased interest in mail voting as a way to stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic. After months of Trump sowing doubt about mail voting, a CNN/SSRS Research Florida poll released July 26 shows that Democrats are much more enthusiastic than Republicans.
Asked how they’d vote in November if they had to choose now, 56% of Democrats and 19% of Republicans said mail voting, 19% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans said in person on Election Day and 23% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans picked regional early voting sites before Election Day.
‘Vote by mail’ or ‘absentee’
Recently Trump shifted his complaints to suggest that mail voting is bad but absentee voting is good, asserting that there is a difference. There isn’t actually any difference. Mail voting was once called absentee voting, something that stems from a long ago era when someone needed a reason to receive an absentee ballot, such as being out-of-town on Election Day.
Florida eliminated the requirement that voters have a reason for a mail ballot as part of election law changes that passed after the chaotic conclusion to the 2000 George W. Bush-Al Gore presidential election. And state law has been changed so that “absentee balloting” no longer exists in the state.
Although there is no difference between mail voting and absentee voting, as the president and some of his supporters assert, there is a difference between the kind of mail voting in Florida — which requires people to actively request mail ballots — and universal mail ballots, a system in which every registered voter in a state automatically gets a mail ballot. Last week, Trump focused his criticism on universal mail voting.
In his reversal, Trump claimed “Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change).” It wasn’t clear what cleaning up he was referring to.
His reference to an attempt at change appeared to refer to a settlement last month in a case in which liberal groups sought to expand vote by mail. The state agreed to minor changes such as educating supervisors of elections about prepaid return postage for ballots.
Trump votes by mail
There’s a twist to Trump’s assertions about mail voting. Like Vice President Mike Pence and many Trump advisers, the president votes by mail.
Last year, when Trump was mad at his longtime home state of New York, he announced that he was making Florida his home state. The president and First Lady Melania Trump voted by mail in the state’s March 17 presidential primary.
Trump and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany have falsely claimed that Trump voted by mail in Florida because his job kept him away from his legal residence in Palm Beach County.
Actually, Trump was in Palm Beach County — where he’s made his Mara-Lago Club his legal address for voting purposes — on March 7 and 8, the first weekend of early voting for the March 17 presidential primary. He didn’t leave until Monday morning March 9.
He could have voted at any of the county’s 16 early-voting sites. White House press pool reports show he spent part of the both weekend days at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. The golf club is across the street from a library where early voting was offered from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days.
Scattered problems
Despite Trump’s repeated assertions that there is something wrong with mail voting, there isn’t evidence to support the president’s claim of widespread voter fraud. Florida has had scattered problems.
The state changed the law starting with 2014 elections to prohibit campaigns from paying people to collect ballots and return them to county elections offices. The prohibition was aimed largely at Miami-Dade County’s a Spanish term for people who collect absentee ballots. They had been linked to fraudulent ballots.
In Palm Beach County, the State Attorney’s Office investigated allegations of mail-in voter fraud in the 2016 primary. Investigators determined that 21 mail-in ballot request forms had been forged, but prosecutors did not pursue charges, noting in a June 2017 memo “there was not enough evidence to name a suspect.”
The biggest problem with mail voting, according to experts, is the opposite of voter fraud. People who chose mail voting have a bigger chance that their votes won’t count than people who vote in person at regional early voting sites or at neighborhood polling places on election day.
Ballots sometimes aren’t counted because people forget to sign the envelope, which is used to verify a voter’s identity, and signatures sometimes don’t match what’s on file.
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