Voting by mail: Trump’s threat to states
President Trump is setting the stage to dispute the results of the November election, said Eric Lach in NewYorker.com. With growing doubts about “whether it will be safe to vote in person” this fall, 11 states are easing restrictions on who can vote by mail. That reasonable precaution incited a hysterical Twitter rant last week from Trump, who says it will cause “the greatest Rigged Election in history.” He threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan and Nevada after those battleground states sent out absentee ballot applications—a blatant and illegal abuse of presidential power. Trump said Democrats will “print thousands of forgeries,” yet there’s no evidence of widespread fraud with absentee ballots, despite their extensive use in many states, said Peter Wade in RollingStone.com. Trump doesn’t care about election integrity. He’s simply “terrified of losing.”
Imagine the potential “nightmare” on Nov. 4, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “Swarms of people have voted by mail for the first time, many of them incorrectly.” State officials are drowning in accusations of fraud, and “a million mail-in ballots have been thrown out.” The election comes down to Wisconsin, and “maybe a canvasser in Milwaukee finds a box of votes in his trunk that he—whoops—forgot to deliver.” It would be the 2000 recount debacle on steroids. Universal voting by mail “is a recipe for confusion, coercion, and fraud,” said John Fund in National Review.com. Thirteen states fail to prohibit the dangerous practice of “ballot harvesting,” in which “political operatives go door-to-door collecting ballots that they then deliver.” In 2016, almost 25 percent of ballots were mailed, and about 1 percent of them were rejected, usually because of an issue with a voter’s signature. An allmail presidential election could be disastrous.
Even before the pandemic, 34 states allowed anyone to request a mail-in ballot, said Ed Kilgore in NYMag.com. “Shouldn’t all the fraud we’ve been told it encourages have been rampantly evident by now?” If Republicans are truly concerned about election integrity, they “should stop fighting large-scale federal assistance to state election officials,” and fund efforts to count mail-in ballots more rapidly and rigorously check signatures. Instead, Trump and his allies are using an “imaginary threat” to suppress votes. If there’s a fall resurgence of coronavirus, what do they propose instead? Insisting that Americans risk their lives to vote would be “morally reprehensible.”