How far will Trump go to stop the blue shift?
IREMEMBER, many decades ago, an early girlfriend enthusing about a “blue shift in Dotty P’s”. I resisted inquiring: “In Dotty P’s what?”, because I did recognise the shorthand for the happily still flourishing women’s fashion retailer, Dorothy Perkins.
So I guessed the blue shift was, and I believe remains, a popular dress style. It is also, however, a contemporary American voting phenomenon – one causing President Trump serious grief.
I’ve never previously started a column with a Trump irrationality. Partly because, occurring several times daily, they simply aren’t newsworthy, but also to avoid stepping too obviously on Chris Bucktin’s Stateside pitch.
But last week Chris himself highlighted Trump’s current No.1 Twitter target, and, since it concerned voting, which interests me, and is of potentially huge political importance, I’m joining in.
As Chris outlined, Trump is potentially jeopardising November’s presidential election by attacking the validity of postal voting and threatening to withhold from the US Postal Service the funding required to process the expected surge in postal ballots in the assigned time.
A typical Trump emotive assault, this one has dripped with confusion – about what exactly he objects to, and what even theoretically he can do about it.
For a start, postal or absentee voting is an odd thing for any American to attack in principle. With almost all aspects of US elections constitutionally regulated by state, rather than federal/national, law, at least some states have been doing it longer and more extensively than virtually any of us.
The Emperor Augustus apparently enabled senators in newly established colonies to send votes under seal for elections to city offices in Rome.
Otherwise, American states were about the first. There are records of ‘absentee voting’ in local elections by soldiers during the American Revolution, and extensively by Union army soldiers during the 1860s Civil War.
No, not the African American ones, obviously, who had to wait at least for the 1870 15th Constitutional Amendment. However, the point is that mail-in voting was a US ‘thing’ – and a ‘state thing’ – decades before the UK and others would make similar provision for overseas forces following the 1914-18 war, and eventually for mere citizens.
Incidentally, it was assumed in those 1860s elections that soldiers would mainly vote ‘blue’ for Abraham Lincoln and northern state Republican candidates – so, in the reverse of today’s party positions, it was the ‘red’ Democrats who opposed the principle of absentee balloting.
Following the Civil War, the states gradually extended absentee voting to civilians, and, by 1924, 45 of the then 48 states operated some kind of absentee voting, with many requiring no specific reason or ‘excuse’.
So, it was nearly a century of history and now 50 states that Trump challenged when he started attacking ‘mail-in ballots’ back in May. Typical tweet extracts: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that mail-in Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent … mail-boxes will be robbed … millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreigners, and others …”
No evidence, citations, references, of course – even when pressed recently by a Pennsylvania federal judge.
Then it was noted that he himself regularly voted by mail. Indeed, applying to vote – for himself – by mail in this year’s Florida Republican primary election, he put the White House, Washington DC as his legal residence, which most Americans know to be some 800 miles or so from Florida – oops!
Potentially tricky – unless, of course, you’re simultaneously a
‘bona fide resident’ of Florida’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago club. Still, at least he clarified that what was actually fraudulent and objectionable was not “Absentee Voting, which I totally support”, but ‘Universal mail-in voting’.
OK – except nowadays in the US that is effectively a distinction without a difference.
This November, all 44 million registered voters in nine states plus Washington, DC will have ballot papers mailed to them, whether they want them or not. 34 states, including Florida, allow absentee voting for all their 118 million voters, who may cite coronavirus, but need not specify any reason.
Which leaves just seven states whose 46 million voters need a non-Covid reason to vote absentee – all but New York, incidentally, being ‘red’-inclined Republican states.
To us, especially those recalling Birmingham’s 2004 Aston/Bordesley Green postal vote fraud scandal – six councillors convicted in an election court of “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud, our city labelled by Judge Richard Mawrey a ‘banana republic’ – the potential loopholes in these state-run procedures look like accidents waiting to happen.
Indeed, they almost certainly do happen, but, with no equivalent of our national Electoral Commission or electoral courts, that’s not the official line.
You want stats? The respected, non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice’s voter fraud investigation found, not terribly helpfully, “incident rates of between 0.0003 per cent and 0.0025 per cent”. Translation: serious instances are sufficiently few and unpublicised that even the President hasn’t (yet) been able to exploit them.
However, as this week’s Republican Convention confirms, he’ll keep trying – right up to election night and a likely ‘blue shift’ looming. In recent close-fought US elections ‘blue’ Republican candidates have tended to establish a sometimes quite healthy lead from in-person votes counted on election night itself – only to see it gradually shift away to the ‘red’ Democrats as mail-in ballots from young, low-income, and highly mobile voters are quite legitimately processed.
If you’re Trump, it’s obvious – if you’re leading on election night, declare yourself the ‘popular vote’ winner on votes counted, and ignore those votes still arriving “out of nowhere”.
Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham
It was nearly a century of history and 50 states that Trump challenged when he started attacking ‘mail-in ballots’