Carl Hiaasen: GOP is afraid mail balloting will increase Democratic turnout,
President Trump, a new Florida resident who votes by mail, says that voting by mail is “a terrible thing.”
Many election supervisors believe it’s the safest way for people to cast ballots in the time of a deadly pandemic, but here’s what the hypocrite-in-chief tweeted the other day:
“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
It certainly didn’t work out well for the Republicans who tried to steal a congressional election in North Carolina in 2018 by tampering with absentee ballots. They got caught, and the voting results were nullified.
It was one of the rare recent cases of fraud connected with mail-in ballots. Machine failure or software glitches cause most election-day drama.
Embarrassed by losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Big Orange Trumpster assembled a national task force that he vowed would expose widespread fraud and irregularities in that election.
Months later, the group disbanded after uncovering nothing.
The deadly COVID-19 outbreak has many state officials pushing to expand the mail-in voting process for residents who are rightfully worried about standing in long lines, risking infection.
Many Republican party leaders are fighting the move toward mail-in voting for the same reason they’ve always fought against lengthening the voting hours and adding extra days for early balloting.
Turnout is the problem. The last thing the GOP wants is more Americans participating in the democratic process, especially in swing states. On election days the party welcomes its base, but not necessarily the neighbors.
Heavy turnout usually means more low-income voters, more women, more young voters, more college-educated voters and more minority voters. These are segments that the Republicans desperately try to keep away from the polls, because by varying margins they tend to favor Democrats.
In Georgia, the Republican state House speaker revealingly fretted that increased absentee voting would be “devastating” because it “will certainly drive up turnout.”
Oh, the horror.
GOP-led voter suppression campaigns throughout the country rely on imposing discriminatory ID requirements and the limiting of poll hours, among other cynical strategies. Fear of the coronavirus is a prime opportunity to keep even more potential voters at home in November.
Trump cheered last week when Republicans won a court decision forcing Wisconsin voters to either risk their health at the polls or miss their state primary, which the Democratic governor had tried to postpone because of the pandemic.
The president and others who oppose mail-in voting warn of wildly rampant fraud but never provide examples. Absentee ballots can be forged (a dead man famously voted in Miami many years ago), but many studies show it doesn’t happen often or in mass numbers.
Interestingly, solidly Republican Utah is one of several states that already hold elections mostly by mail. Yet here’s an actual sentence uttered last week by our postal-voting president on the perils of voting postal: “And you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room signing ballots all over the place.”
That’s a big-ass living room. Trump’s attack on mail-in voting puts one of his acolytes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, on the spot. State Republicans were the ones who broadened voter access to mail-in ballots back in 2002.
Because of COVID-19, roughly 50 percent of the ballots cast in the March 17 primary arrived by mail. Only about 12,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted that way — a puny difference considering the race for the Democratic nomination was still undecided, while
Trump was running unopposed on the GOP ballot.
More significant is what occurred in 2016: Florida Republicans cast about 1.1 million mail-in votes, 60,000 more than Democrats did. Those absentee ballots provided more than half of Trump’s 112,911vote margin of victory over Clinton here.
So now this unstable nongenius is trashing the balloting option that helped him win a critical swing state in that election, and would likely help him again this fall.
A large chunk of Trump’s Florida base is older and more vulnerable to the virus. Masked or not, the careful ones won’t want to risk lining up at a precinct in November.
Instead of making Floridians request absentee ballots, as they must now do, why not switch to all-mail elections, as Ohio and some other states hard-hit by the pandemic are doing?
As of this writing, DeSantis hasn’t committed to endorsing that idea, which is also supported by Democratic leaders. Don’t be surprised if the governor gets cold feet.
Unless, of course, he can think of a way to mail ballots only to the living rooms of registered Republicans.