2020 ELECTION
TRUMP’S
VENDETTA AGAINST MAIL-IN VOTING COULD COST HIM THE 2020 ELECTION
The president’s claims
that mail-in ballots are corrupt, even during a pandemic, could make a fraught
process harder, hindering Republican efforts to get out the vote and
disenfranchising Trump’s own supporters.
BY KEN STERN
APRIL 17, 2020
As last week’s election debacle unfolded in Wisconsin, and tens
of thousands of people struggled to get their votes counted, Donald
Trump let loose: “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to
statewide mail-in voting,” he tweeted. “Democrats are clamoring for it.
Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out
well for Republicans.” It’s distracting and inaccurate, but the president gets
rare points for honesty in admitting that his views on mail-in voting are
dictated by electoral self-interest.
But deduct points for political acumen. When I
spoke to a cross-section of voting experts, they all rejected the idea that
mail-in voting hurts Republicans. Wendy Weiser, an expert at
the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, told me that it is
“very baffling that the point of attack is on a method that favors older,
whiter voters.” Michael Hanmer, an election expert at the
University of Maryland, argued that there is no evidence that expanding mail-in
voting is inherently favorable to either party and that, like most voting
efforts, it tends to favor whoever best organizes, educates, and motivates
their base.
An effective get-out-and-mail strategy by Republicans among older
voters has been credited with cementing the party’s strength in both Arizona
(where Republicans substantially outpace Democrats on the list of people
automatically receiving mail ballots) and Florida.
This year the stakes could be even higher. If
coronavirus resurges in the fall, as some experts have warned, older voters
could be even more discouraged from in-person voting. In a recent Morning Consult poll,
74% of voters over 65 indicated they would be very or somewhat concerned about
in-person voting if coronavirus were still a material threat in November. In
what could be a painfully close election, even incremental drop-offs could pose
a significant threat to Republican chances. Even worse for the president,
confidence among Republicans in mail-in balloting now runs more than 20
percentage points behind Democrats, according to Morning Consult, and voters
who are very favorable to Trump are a full 27 points behind those who are very
unfavorable. This could well have a negative effect on Trump turnout if
in-person voting becomes difficult, as it did in Wisconsin last week.
Because of this, not all Republican leaders
immediately fell in behind Trump. Some did; Missouri governor Pat
Parson declared he was “not interested in making any drastic
changes…out of fear.” (Mail-in voting in Missouri is notoriously difficult: It
is permitted only in six statutorily defined situations, and a notary must
witness your signature on the absentee ballot in most cases.) Republican
officials in other states, including Ohio, Washington, Nebraska, and West
Virginia, all openly defended the efficacy of the process, or began pushing
changes to make it easier to vote by mail. Even Trump walked back his comments,
at least a little bit, tweeting, “Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for
the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on
Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which
is ‘RIPE for FRAUD,’ and shouldn’t be allowed!”
Likely more important, though, is the impact
of Trump’s rants on local Republican officials. Voting by mail, especially for
people not used to the process, is a fraught affair, with many opportunities
for disqualifying mistakes. First-time mail voters need to learn how and when
to request ballots, states will have to print and distribute millions of them,
and voters will need to learn how to fill them out, at times navigating
multiple signatures, witnesses, and, in a few cases, even notarization. Each of
these steps makes dropouts more likely, and requires voter education, training
of election (and postal) staff, and significant investments in technology. If
you don’t do it right, you end up with lots of “errors on both ends,” as Hanmer
put it to me.
A small group of states are well positioned to deal with the
inevitable surge in demand for distance voting—Oregon, Washington, Utah,
Colorado, and Hawaii already automatically mail a ballot to every registered
voter, and a handful of other states, California and Florida included, already
have such high rates of mail voting that they can likely handle a huge uptick.
The other 40 states or so all permit some form of mail voting. But they could
easily be overwhelmed by sheer volume.
Wisconsin is an early warning of what can go
wrong in an overloaded system. Problems emerged at every stage in the process,
but they were acute for the hundreds of thousands of voters who opted to vote
by mail: Thousands never received their ballots, and thousands more completed
ballots that were rejected due to a lack of a postmark, leaving many voters
“quite literally without a vote,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so
presciently warned. The final results in Wisconsin favored the Democrats, which
may lead some Republicans to rethink their strategies, but it will undoubtedly
leave a residue of litigation, disenfranchisement, and a sense of illegitimacy
around the process. Wisconsin may be a hard case due to its extraordinarily bad
timing, but many of the aggravating factors could well be at work on a national
basis come November, in what most are predicting will be a record-turnout
election. As Michael McDonald, an expert in voting at the
University of Florida, told me, Wisconsin is a “canary in the coal mine. We
could easily end up with a whole flock of canaries.”
Voter education is one of the best tools for
increasing successful use of mail ballots, substantially raising the stakes for
each party’s organizing efforts. Trump’s rhetoric could easily have a chilling
effect on Republican efforts as local officials grapple with voter skepticism.
Early fallout could be seen in Georgia, where Republican secretary of
state Brad Raffensperger moved quickly to mail absentee ballot
request forms to all 6.9 million active voters in the state. Criticized for his
efforts by his own party, Raffensperger hastily assembled a task force to
address remote-voting fraud. If Trump pushes party officials to prioritize
fraud over fulfillment, local Republicans may spend too much time worrying
about the relatively small risks associated with manipulation of the process,
and lose focus on the critical task of helping constituents vote. Wisconsin is
again a warning: Local Republicans’ effort focused on undermining mail-in
voting, while Democrats invested in helping their voters navigate the
challenging system the Republicans put in place. The result was a
proportionally higher turnout for Democrats, and a significant electoral rebuke
for Wisconsin Republicans.
It’s still a bit of a mystery why Trump, and
other leading Republicans, have reacted so negatively to mail-in voting.
Republicans are the ones who first embraced the process in the 1990s, on the
reasonable theory that it would be of greatest advantage to older voters.
Hanmer, the University of Maryland expert, noted that Trump was successful
under the rules of 2016, and may just be reluctant to endorse any changes to a
voting regime that treated him well. More likely, though, as Barry
Burden, a voting expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put
it, his attitude reflects “a knee-jerk reaction to expanding voter
opportunities.” The two parties have spent decades battling over voting
procedures, with Republicans often suspicious of efforts to make voting easier,
fearful of Democrats trying to empower young people and people of color. In
theory, Trump has grown so accustomed to associating voter access with
Democratic turnout that he leapt to the conclusion that mail-in voting falls
into that category.
Fortunately, many states, controlled by both Democrats and
Republicans, are already taking steps toward strengthening the fall voting
process; every expert I spoke to said that a strong nonpartisan ethic among
local election officials will be the nation’s best asset. This week the Washington
Post reported that
governors and secretaries of state in Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Georgia
announced steps to encourage widespread mail-in voting.
But the challenge for
even well-intentioned states is substantial. Many will have to navigate
primaries and special elections between now and November, leaving precious
little time and resources to telescope three years of effort into one chaotic
six-month period. And so far congressional Republicans have been willing to
fund only a small portion of the estimated $2 billion it will cost to expand
mail voting for the fall. With all these challenges, Burden admitted that
“whatever we do, it will be flawed in some way.” Failure to minimize those
flaws, however, could throw the results of the 2020 election into the courts of
law, or worse, the courts of public opinion.
