At his April 7 coronavirus briefing, Donald Trump decried the dangers of allowing Americans to vote by mail.
“Mail ballots — they cheat. OK? People cheat,” he said without offering any evidence. “There’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting.”
When asked why he himself voted absentee by mail, Trump said, “Because I’m allowed to. Well, that’s called ‘out of state.’ You know, why I voted? Because I happen to be in the White House and I won’t be able to go to Florida to vote.”
Luckily, the president won’t even have to go online and download that absentee ballot request form this cycle, and neither will anyone else in Palm Beach County. Because Palm Beach’s elections supervisor just mailed it right out to every registered voter in the county.
By law, she can’t send out the actual ballot unless a voter requests it, but, as Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link told NBC, “My goal is to get as many voters to vote in every election as possible, and if people are uncomfortable doing that in person, the best answer is to send a vote-by-mail request.” That’s why supervisors in Miami Dade and Broward Counties did the same, meaning that more than a quarter of registered voters in swingy Florida got the absentee ballot form in their mailboxes.
Which is a responsible way to behave in a highly contagious pandemic. Unlike the Wisconsin legislature, which sued to make voters cast ballots in person this month, forcing thousands of people to stand in line for hours as poll workers stayed home and hundreds of polling places closed.
Remember House Speaker Robin Vos, decked out in full PPE on election day telling voters everything was totally safe?
After 19 new cases of COVID-19 were traced to voters and poll workers who showed up for that election, the Milwaukee Common Council voted unanimously this week to mail the actual absentee ballot with a postage-paid return envelope to every registered voter in Wisconsin’s largest city.
Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State has similarly promised to send an absentee ballot request form to every voter in the state and strongly discouraged in-person voting for the primary.
Even before coronavirus, huge numbers of Americans were already opting to let the postman drop off their ballots. Oregon and Washington have long been vote-by-mail only; Two-thirds of Wisconsinites cast their ballots by mail in this primary; And multiple states, including Ohio and Maryland, are running all-mail primaries in light of the health crisis. So, before the general election, plenty of us will get comfortable casting a ballot without the joys of standing in line, grabbing a pencil that 500 other people just used, and then rubbing our hands all over a communal touch screen.
Which puts Republicans in a pickle. After spending the better part of a decade whipping their voters into a frenzy about a supposed plague of in-person voter fraud, they’re furiously pivoting to warning of the dangers of “ballot harvesting.” But with more and more Americans of both parties opting to vote from the comfort of their own living rooms, how long can the GOP pretend that there’s something deviant about it?
“RIPE for FRAUD.”
Be that as it may, it seems pretty unlikely that the GOP in Florida and Wisconsin will stand on principal and let voters in highly Democratic cities receive ballots automatically, while their own constituents have to jump through hoops to get their hands on them.
Last month, Trump went on Fox and said the quiet part out loud, as is his wont.
Back in Palm Beach, elections supervisor Link was not impressed. “It’s something that the president feels secure enough with that he voted with it himself, notwithstanding what his other comments may have been,” she told NBC. And with Republican governors like Mike DeWine and Larry Hogan jumping on the mail-in bandwagon, how long until the GOP realize they can’t beat ’em, so they might as well join ’em?
Trump’s home county and other Democratic strongholds ramp up vote-by-mail [NBC]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.