President shouldn’t undermine mail-in voting

How ironic. For the past couple years, we’ve insisted any new digital voting machines needed to come with a paper trail. With threats of hacking on everybody’s mind, a paper trail was considered vital to ensure that we’d have a backup we could depend upon if results were disputed.

Even in the unlikely event digital machines were ever hacked, it was argued, it would be a far, far harder thing to also falsify millions of individual paper ballots, hence the integrity of the process could be protected by keeping a paper trail.

In the midst of a pandemic, voting by mail is widely regarded as a health-related matter. But consider, too, that voting by mail also provides the ultimate paper trail.

Now Donald Trump seems to feel voting by mail undermines the integrity of the process. He can provide no evidence and his argument goes against all common sense if taken at face value. We should not take it at face value.

But it’s a sad day for democracy when the president of the United States undermines public confidence in the voting process because he fears the voters’ judgment.

Charles Fusner Bethlehem