Republicans didn’t always hate mail-in voting

Republicans hate mail-in voting, except when they love it.

Back in 2000, it was a centerpiece of the GOP’s Florida campaign effort.

Then-Gov. Jeb Bush sent a letter to Republican voters in his state, urging them to vote by mail and stressing the convenience of casting an early vote from home.

The Florida Republican Party spent $500,000 producing and mass-mailing Bush’s letter, which included an attached ballot request card.

When canvassing boards in seven Florida counties rejected more than 250 undated mail-in ballots that had come from overseas (on the grounds that ballots needed to be dated or postmarked by Election Day), Republicans didn’t thank those boards for saving Florida from voter fraud. They sued to get those undated ballots counted.

Democrats attempted to get 15,000 absentee ballots (which went Republican by a 2-1 margin) thrown out in Seminole County because the county’s election supervisor, a Republican, had allowed GOP volunteers to fill in missing data on thousands of incomplete ballots.

The Florida GOP, however, fought to get those shady mail-in ballots counted.

All that work ultimately paid off.

The governor’s brother,

George W. Bush, won the 2000 presidential election over Al Gore on the strength of a 537-vote Florida victory. In Miami-Dade County, which Gore carried by nearly 470,000 votes, Bush nonetheless won the mail-in vote by more than 7,000 votes. That was the whole ballgame for the BushGore race.

The 2000 Florida example merely confirms what our political instincts should have told us: that all this recent GOP blather about the inherent fraudulence that comes with massive mail-in voting is pure political self-interest masquerading as election integrity vigilance.

When mail-in voting means military ballots, which GOP operatives view as favorable to their cause, Republicans have no worries about mail-in fraud or ballot tampering.

When mail-in voting means an edge for Republican candidates, as it did in Florida in 2000, then it’s a wonderful, convenient option that allows you to avoid those long voting lines and bask in the comfort of voting from home.

Of course, this year, everything is complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats, who generally benefit from large turnouts, are worried that many of their voters will be scared away from voting if their only option is to vote in person.

Republicans are worried that the expansion of mail-in voting will mean a reduction in their probability of success.

In Texas, the election code restricts absentee voting to those who meet at least one of the following conditions: 65 and over, disabled, out of the county or incarcerated.

The Texas Democratic Party has waged a legal battle on both the state and federal court fronts to expand access to mail-in voting. The party has argued that the threat of COVID-19, and a lack of immunity to the virus, should qualify as a physical condition.

On Wednesday, the Texas Supreme Court shot down that argument.

The federal court battle will likely reach its conclusion at the U.S. Supreme Court. Democrats, mindful of the court’s conservative majority, are privately skeptical that the verdict will go their way.

Meanwhile, we are left to consider the brazen hypocrisy of the GOP argument on mail-in voting.

Over the past week, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was asked to reconcile her support for President Donald Trump’s contention that mail-in voting is a “scam” with her own record of voting by mail 11 times over the past 10 years.

McEnany said the president supports mail-in voting when it’s “for a reason.” She added, “What he’s not for is mass mail-in voting, what (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi is asking for, which we know is subject to fraud.”

Mail-in voting “for a reason.” Wouldn’t the need to observe social distancing and slow the spread of the worst pandemic in more than a century qualify as “a reason”?

On Friday, the Texas Tribune published a story pointing out that three state leaders who have opposed the expansion of mail-in voting — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton — all have a personal history of voting by mail.

In purely legal terms, the Texas Supreme Court may be correct to conclude that a lack of immunity to the coronavirus is not a disability. But Abbott could have done the right thing by the voters of this state and either issued an emergency order expanding mail-in voting or calling for a special legislative session to address the issue.

Abbott considered the public health risks associated with inperson voting sufficient to move back this year’s primary runoffs from May to July. Those public health risks, however, apparently were not sufficient to justify expanded mail-in voting.

After all, mail-in voting carries its own risk for the GOP. The risk of defeat.