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Maeve Korengold writes about Donald Trump’s opposition to mail-in voting. The American president apparently fears widespread fraud and corruption, although critics fear he is jeopardising democracy. While many Republican supporters are critical of the system, election officials say there is no legitimate cause for concern. Learn more about the risks in-person voting poses amid a pandemic.
As the Democratic National Convention come to a close and the Republican Convention commences, the USA looks forward to the presidential election on November third. However, President Trump continues to speak out against mail-in voting and the election system.
According to the New York Times, President Trump “promoting baseless questions about election fraud” is nothing new. In 2013, he implied that Barack Obama’s election was the result of “dead voters.” In addition to this, Mr. Trump said that undocumented immigrants were voting “en masse” and that voters were taken into New Hampshire from out of state in 2016.
On Tuesday, August eighteenth, during an appearance in Arizona, President Trump announced that the 2020 election “will be, in my opinion, the most corrupt election in the history of our country, and we cannot let this happen,” without giving any verification.
“There is tremendous evidence of fraud whenever you have mail-in ballots,” he went on to say. This claim is easily disproven by both independent and government studies.
President Trump has made sixty false claims that since April, all of which are proven to be false by the experience of states such as Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah that offer mail-in voting.
A poll released on Wednesday the nineteenth demonstrated that Mr. Trump’s false claims and attacks are impacting the opinions of his supporters. While eighty-eight percent of Biden supporters in six swing states either strongly or somewhat support mail-in voting, seventy-two percent of Trump supporters strongly or somewhat oppose it.
President Trump’s base is already taking action. Some of his supporters in Michigan burned the absentee ballot applications that were sent to them by mail and state governments in Alabama and Kansas have begun to distance themselves from broadened vote-by-mail plans.
President Trump’s comments have garnered concern from many people who are involved in the election process.
Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, says “His comments are exceedingly damaging to democracy, to America’s standing in the world, to voters’ confidence in our elections. If you are riling up supporters into a state of anger over the legitimacy of the election, they might actually take steps to try to suppress votes and to undermine the actual legitimate running of the election”
Some election officials and experts believe that Trump’s claims were “were no different” than Russia and other countries’ tampering of American politics.
Amber McReynolds, a former election official from Colorado and the current chief executive of the National Vote at Home Institute, says “It is misinformation and disinformation, and it’s no different than foreign adversaries and cyberhackers spewing info about an election process.”
Both Republican and Democratic officials say that President Trump’s statements are making their jobs more difficult.
Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state in Washington, reported that finding enough poll workers to safely count ballots in the middle of the pandemic was difficult. “What he’s trying to do is absolutely clear: He is not just seeking to undermine the confidence in the election, but confidence in the November election results that he may not like,” said Alex Padilla, the Democratic secretary of state in California.
Despite the situation caused by the President’s false accusations, many people are preparing to vote by mail and working to persuade others to do the same. Grassroots organizations such as Virginia group Indivisible Below the Beltway are writing postcards to send to first-time and previous voters with messages encouraging them to vote.
Local government officials have encouraged mail-in voting. “This is the first election in Virginia history where no excuse is required for absentee balloting,” said Justin Wilson, the Mayor of Alexandria. “You can say you would like a mail ballot and you can get one.”
Many people have also been putting out information about the process of casting a mail-in ballot. Social media creators have produced infographics and easy to digest slideshows with details and guidance about mail-in voting, including when to mail your ballot to be sure that it gets to its destination on time.
News outlets have carried out interviews with election experts in an effort to dispel any rumors or uncertainty surrounding this year’s process. In an interview with CNN, Rick Hasen, a professor who is considered “one of the nation's top experts in election law,” talked through why the President’s claims are blatantly false and how mail-in voting works. “While no voting system is perfect and perfectly free from fraud, the amount of fraud related to absentee balloting is quite low relative to the number of ballots that are cast, and the benefits of absentee balloting, which is primarily convenience for voters and election administrators [which] is now heightened under pandemic conditions where people without immunity to COVID-19 could contract the virus if they need to stand in long lines at polling places under pandemic conditions,” he said.