How Trump could put his stamp on things
President openly says he’s using postal service funding to alter election
WASHINGTON— Thursday morning on Fox News, President Donald Trump said openly he’s using the U.S. Postal Service funding to essentially alter the election outcome.
“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said, discussing funding for mail-in voting as part of coronavirus relief measures that he has repeatedly threatened to veto. “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.” Trump had made a similar point Wednesday evening at the White House.
But he sent a mixed message at an evening press conference Thursday when he said he wouldn’t necessarily veto any post office funding bill, but that he opposes universal mail-in ballots as potentially fraudulent, and that if the coronavirus relief package is not passed including the funding, then mailin balloting won’t be feasible.
“I would end up being fraudulent,” he said. As he has before, he drew a distinction between absentee ballots people have to request, which he supports, and universal mail-in ballots sent out to all voters.
“Absentee good, universal mail-in very bad,” he said. “We’re open to something, but we’re not open to the kind of money they need.” He made a similar point
Wednesday evening at the White House. And it comes after weeks of reports of a massive reorganizing of the postal service by a Trump appointee that seems designed to slow down the handling of ballots, possibly creating chaos in November and disenfranchising thousands or millions of voters.
Ronald Stroman, who stepped down as second-in-command at the post office earlier this year, told the Guardian this week the reorganization had a high risk of causing election chaos. “If you can’t right the ship, if you can’t correct these fast enough, the consequence is not just, OK, people don’t get their mail, it’s that you disenfranchise people,” Stroman said.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said the changes aren’t election-related, and are simply aimed at efficiency, but Trump’s comments about funding make the attempt to stifle mail-in voting explicit.
In a year in which some estimates have placed the proportion of mail-in voting as high as 70 per cent, the strategy by Trump to hobble voting by mail seems designed to help him in two ways.
First, most mail-in votes are expected to be cast by Democrats. This “Blue Shift” by Democrats has been observable for years, and it has been the case in some primaries this year. A recent Marquette University poll showed that among the 35 per cent of voters planning to cast a ballot by mail, 81 per cent planned to vote for Democrat Joe Biden versus only 14 per cent for Trump. Anything that makes those ballots harder to cast or that makes it likely they can’t be counted because they arrive too late would seem to help Trump.
Second, slowing down delivery of mail-in ballots could help Trump. Mail-in vote results are typically reported later than inperson voting, sometimes well after election night. If on election night Trump has even a narrow lead, he might declare victory without waiting for mail-in ballots to be counted. He could then declare that any change in the result because of mail-in ballots is an attempt to steal the election.
Trump foreshadowed such an outcome when he tweeted in June, “Must know election results on the night of the election, not days, months, or even years later!” Late last month, he said at the White House he was opposed to having to wait days after the election to declare the winner.
If he declares victory on election night even though ballots are still being counted, challenges to the results in state legislatures (which control presidential elections) and the courts (which ordered a stop to recounting in Florida in 2000), plus the impact of public opinion could make things messy and complicated. If Trump refuses to step down, it would be a full-blown constitutional crisis with results that are difficult to predict.
Election law expert Edward Foley wrote a paper in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal last year, as Alexander Panetta of the CBC recently reported, envisioning a disputed election. “The most frightening scenario is where the dispute remains unresolved on January 20, 2021, the date for the inauguration of the new presidential term, and the military is uncertain as to who is entitled to receive the nuclear codes as commander-in-chief.” Trump’s months-long attempts to delegitimize mail-in ballots by repeatedly claiming that it is a vehicle for fraud and an attempt to steal the election from him seem designed to set up just such a scenario, and efforts to undermine mail-in voting — through funding, policy changes, and court challenges to laws that streamline the process — seem only to make it more likely. Trump has long claimed, without evidence, mail-in voting would be used to steal the election. But he’s been providing some evidence that suggests he could sabotage the mail-voting system in ways that would allow him to steal it himself.