There’s a giant scheme afoot to disenfranchise voters in November—it’s called mail-in balloting.
Mail-in voting has, like many things in our politics, taken on the aspect of tribal warfare—if President Donald Trump is vociferously against it, Democrats must be vociferously for it, and vice versa.
Absentee voting isn’t as secure as in-person voting, but there’s no evidence of widespread fraud, as Trump repeatedly alleges, sometimes in ALL CAPS. Nor is there any evidence that, at least prior to this campaign, mail-in voting has favored Democrats, as the president also believes.
Trump shouldn’t be trying to delegitimize the process, a point that journalists have often made, rightly. Yet there hasn’t been enough focus on the other side of equation: Does it make sense for Democrats to be such fervent boosters of a process that may lead to a historic number of votes cast in a presidential election not counting? Stacey Abrams, call your office.
No matter what anyone says or does, there is inevitably going to be more mail-in voting this fall, given fears of the coronavirus. States and localities should prepare as early and as best as they can. But in-person voting is superior. Only about one-hundredth of 1 percent of in-person votes are rejected, whereas rejection rates of 1 percent are common with mail-in votes, and many states exceeded that during their primaries this year.
This should be a five-alarm worry for Democrats. According to polling, almost twice as many Biden supporters as Trump supporters say they’ll vote by mail this year. According to NPR, studies show “that voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count.” In another universe, if Trump were urging Democrats to stay away from the polls and instead use the method much more likely to get their votes discarded, it’d be attacked as a dastardly voter-suppression scheme…