Trump has made it very, very clear that he believes vote-by-mail will result in him losing the election. He says people cheat which can happen, but the rare documented cases have all been by Republicans.
Fortunately, the country has been moving to vote by mail for some time and the option exists in the states Trump needs the most. Ron Brownstein writes:
In the states that will likely decide the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump has already lost his newly declared war against voting by mail.
All six of the swing states that both sides see as the most probable tipping points allow their residents to vote by mail for any reason, and there’s virtually no chance that any of them will retrench their existing laws this year. That means that, however much Trump rages, the legal structure is in place for a mail-voting surge in those decisive states: Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona in the Sun Belt and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt.
Such an increase “is going to happen” in states across the country this year, says Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The president can’t prevent it from happening, his protestations notwithstanding. Voters are going to choose that option, and jurisdictions are going to need to make that option widely available in order to protect public health and administer their elections.”
That doesn’t mean Trump’s new crusade will have no effect. It’s so far stiffening Republican opposition to plans for furthering expand mail-voting access in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Those proposals include calls from Democrats and election-law reformers to preemptively mail all eligible voters a ballot, as five states do now, or to require all states to allow their residents to vote absentee for any reason. In the 28 states that already allow this “no excuse” absentee balloting, partisan struggles are nevertheless looming over whether to make the voting process easier.
But experts in voter turnout and mail voting anticipate that however these fights play out, the share of Americans who cast ballots by mail in November may roughly double from the previous presidential election, from just under one-quarter in 2016 to about one-half this year. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state and a Democrat, expressed a broad consensus among local officials when she told me, “We will certainly see people voting by mail more than ever before in our state.”
This will present a big problem for states that aren’t set up for this although there is time to adjust if they choose to do it. We can almost certainly expect that the states run by Republicans will do everything in their power to put roadblocks up and very possibly cheat in ways we can only imagine. If the pandemic crisis is still raging I genuinely fear for the results.
And worse, I can’t see that there would be anything done about it. They’ve been setting the table for this since the 2000 election. And considering that the Supreme Curt just made a blatantly partisan decision in Wisconsin on voting regulations I think we can count on them for a reprise of Bush vs Gore whenever it’s necessary.
Of course, the irony is this:
“When you have a system of elections that have multiple methods by which people can vote—mail, in-person early voting, or Election Day—the mail ballots tend to be the most Republican of the group,” says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout.
Absentee voting was always considered a great GOP advantage. Now that Democrats want to use it they don’t like it. Of course.
So what’s the good news? Well, if the election doesn’t turn out to be total chaos, which may be possible, vote-by-mail will be available where it’s necessary: those all-important swing states that Trump must get to keep his lousy minority win in the electoral college.
17 states allow vote by mail only for cause and they are not among those crucial swing states.
The genuinely key states for November all fall into the middle category, allowing no-excuse mail balloting. They include not only the six noted above, but even a second tier of possibly competitive states, such as Iowa, Georgia, and Ohio (which Democrats might try to contest with smaller chances of success), and Minnesota, Nevada, and New Mexico (which Trump still hopes, at long odds, to contest).
The entire debate over voter access this fall would probably look very different without big recent changes to the law in two of the most crucial swing states: Michigan and Pennsylvania. Both states used to require voters to have an excuse for requesting a mail ballot. In November, both will use a no-excuse vote-by-mail system for the first time in a general election.
The irony in the president’s new offensive is that in many of the no-excuse states, Republicans have historically outpaced Democrats in organizing their supporters, especially older white voters, to vote by mail. In Arizona, for instance, Republicans outnumber Democrats on the state rolls of voters who have signed up to automatically receive a mail ballot. Arizonans over 50, a conservative-leaning bloc, also significantly outnumber those under 40. Voting by mail there has traditionally been “a Republican advantage,” Charles Coughlin, a veteran GOP consultant in the state, told me. “It was a program we have perfected over time because we chased it, and we made it happen.” The same is true in Florida.
Poll actually show him losing ground with the over-65 crowd. I suspect he’s very well aware that his only chance is to either suppress the vote entirely or turn it into such a shitshow that he can claim the outcome is illegitimate. It looks like the latter is going to be the play — and he’s got some GOP legislatures and Governors standing ready to help him.
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