Can Donald Trump Stop “Vote by Mail”?

Even though the President has in fact cast his own Florida ballots by mail in 2018, he knows that anything that makes voting easier will increase the November turnout. And anything that increases voter turnout, to him anyway, is likely to open the door to more minority voters to cast ballots, voters who appear to lean towards Democratic candidates. Many red states have figured that if they close polling stations in minority neighborhoods, leaving them easily accessible only in white traditional neighborhoods, this can only work to enhance Republican candidates and issues, especially if the can eliminate “vote by mail,” a highly recommended procedure where health challenges pressure folks not to leave their homes very much.

While it is happening all over the South, one red state can claim the grand prize of voter exclusion: “Last year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans… The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinos.” Guardian UK, March 2^nd.

If only the GOP could be sure that those minority voters could not take the easy path and vote by mail. “President Trump on Wednesday [5/20] doubled down on his threat to withhold funding from states over plans to allow more voting to be conducted by mail, claiming that mail-in ballots are riddled with ‘tremendous fraud.’… ‘Mail-in ballots are very dangerous. There is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality,’ Trump told reporters during a meeting with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (D).

“The president earlier Wednesday [5/20] had threatened to withhold funding from Michigan and Nevada over their election plans, claiming in tweets that the decision by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) to send applications for absentee ballots to the state’s 7.7 million registered voters was done ‘illegally’ and ‘without authorization.’… Michigan voters, however, passed a ballot measure in 2018 allowing for no-reason absentee voting, and Benson told The New York Times in an interview Wednesday that the decision was ‘completely within my authority.’” TheHill.com, May 21^st.

Further, fraudulent mail voting is simply not statistically relevant: “Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and Coalition, said fraud with mail or absentee ballots is ‘exceedingly rare.’ She pointed to [the conservative Heritage Foundation’s],own election fraud database, which has documented 206 cases of fraudulent use of absentee ballots since 1991. For the five states that conduct elections entirely by mail, the database has no such cases in Hawaii and Utah, two in Oregon, five in Colorado and six in Washington… ‘There's just no real indication of any kind of widespread or systematic voter fraud,’ said Justin Lee, Utah's director of elections.” RollCall.com, April 16^th.

There is already a flood of vote-by-mail, many states have had that feature for many years. “In 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…

“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 shift will create enormous logistical challenges, particularly in states where relatively few people historically have used the option. But contrary to the president’s warnings, the evidence suggests it is unlikely to provide a clear advantage for either party. Using data from the large post-election poll known as the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Charles Stewart found that roughly the same share of Republicans and Democrats voted by mail in 2016.” The Atlantic, April 11^th.

Nevertheless, Republicans sure to want to kill anything that enhances vote-by-mail. “A poll of over 1,000 Americans conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research this month found that 83% of those surveyed were at least somewhat worried that easing restrictions in their own communities might lead to new infections.

“A federal judge in Texas cited similar public health concerns on Tuesday when he issued a ruling that would make all of the state’s voters eligible to cast ballots by mail because of the danger of spreading the virus at polling places... But on Wednesday [5/20], a three-judge panel at the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans temporarily blocked the expansion of mail-in voting in Texas, saying the court needs time to review the ruling and consider an appeal by the Texas attorney general.” Los Angeles Times, May 21^st.

But what’s the surest way to make sure that vote by mail will not happen? Shut down the U.S. Postal Service entirely! “The United States Postal Service is set to run out of money by September. The previous round of emergency coronavirus aid did not take the long-beleaguered Postal Service into account. Conservative policymakers have been eyeing the USPS with hungry privatizing chops for a long time, and have been hamstringing it with ridiculous provisions like forcing the USPS to take into account 50 years of pension payments in advance in its budget, which no other corporation or public agency has to do.” Washington Monthly April 20^th. The GOP has refused to include funding the USPS in any of the recent stimuli bills. Trump has suggested that the Post Office just quadruple the cost of shipping packages and jack up the price of stamps by a wide margin. At least that would make Trump-opponent, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, squirm.

But there’s a catch. Such a large part of rural America – trump country – relies on the USPS for so very much. Those long, stretched-out country routes aren’t particularly commercially viable for daily FedEx or UPS trucks, and in very isolated communities, those for-profit services don’t even try. There are a lot of small town and country folk who will get seriously angry if the USPS shuts down. The US Mail is one of America’s most beloved institutions. Might not stop Donald Trump, since he believes he has a lock on that rural vote no matter what, and what he really cares about his is own personal reelection. That alone could doom the USPS, unless those GOP House and Senate candidates start worrying that those local voters might have second thoughts about THEM.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and desperation, with dramatically few commitments other than to self-aggrandizement, can lead to the destruction of some of America’s most basic institutions, like the Post Office and democracy.