Trump takes new swipe at push to expand voting by mail amid coronavirus crisis

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Is mail-in voting a recipe for fraud?

Dan Henninger, Wall Street Journal, weighs in on the controversy over mail-in voting if coronavirus spikes up in November

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President Trump’s keeping up his full-court press against efforts by Democrats and even some Republicans to expand voting by mail and absentee ballot this November due to health threats from the coronavirus pandemic.

Taking to Twitter and typing in all caps, the president called on Tuesday to “GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD. THE USA MUST HAVE VOTER I.D., THE ONLY WAY TO GET AN HONEST COUNT!”

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Ballot harvesting – also known as vote harvesting – is political speak for a practice in which organized workers, activists, or volunteers collect absentee or mail-in ballots and drop them off at a polling location or election office. It’s legal in some states and illegal in others. The term – which carries a negative connotation – suggests voting improprieties or even election fraud.

Republicans claim that ballot harvesting in California in 2018 – where it was legal – helped Democrats sweep U.S. House races, and regain the majority in the chamber. But a case of ballot harvesting in a 2018 congressional race in North Carolina – where the practice was illegal – led to a new special election and charges against a Republican operative.

Meanwhile, in Nevada, Democrats now want to suspend ballot-harvesting prosecutions.

The tweet by the president comes a week after he argued at a daily Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the White House that “mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt.”

Trump then suggested that “you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in someone's living room signing ballots all over the place. … I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing.” The president didn’t offer evidence to back up his claim that voting by mail is rampant with fraud and abuse.

The president’s comments follow a similar attack on voting by mail just days earlier, when he charged that “a lot of people cheat with mail-in voting.”

“It shouldn’t be mail-in voting," Trump added. "It should be: you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself. You don’t send it in the mail where people can pick up. All sorts of bad things can happen … by the time it gets in and is tabulated."

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The recent attacks by the president are his latest claims -- disputed by critics and opponents -- regarding voter fraud, which he insists kept him from winning the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election. While Trump crushed Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College vote to win the White House, the Democratic nominee topped Trump by nearly 3 million votes in the national popular count.

When a reporter pointed out last week that the president voted by mail in Florida’s primary election last month, Trump responded saying, “Sure. I can vote by mail ... because I’m allowed to."

“I happened to be at the White House,” the president said, explaining that he wasn’t able to go to Florida – where he’s registered to vote – to cast a ballot in person.

The president argued that “there’s a big difference between somebody’s that out-of-state and does a ballot and everything’s sealed, certified, and everything else” and the increasingly popular use of mail-in voting and absentee balloting for voters who are not out of state. “There’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting,” Trump said.

Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington – vote entirely by mail. A majority of states allow no-excuse absentee balloting.

With the coronavirus outbreak forcing social distancing and keeping most Americans in their homes in hopes of preventing a spread of the virus, the Democratic presidential nomination calendar was upended, with many states delaying their remaining primary elections or transforming them nearly entirely to voting by mail and absentee balloting -- though the presidential primary is now essentially over.

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Among the states moving to the vote-by-mail option is Ohio. The state’s in-person voting – which was scheduled for March 17 – was scrapped at the last minute due to coronavirus health concerns.

Under a bill passed by the state’s legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, postcards are being sent to every registered voter to explain how they can obtain a vote-by-mail application. Ballots must be postmarked by April 27 to be counted. The state will allow an extremely limited group of people – mostly disabled voters – to cast a ballot in person on April 28.

But last week Wisconsin became the first state to hold in-person voting during the pandemic.

Two last-minute moves by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and allied progressive and voting rights groups to postpone in-person voting and extend the deadline to vote by absentee ballot due to health concerns amid the pandemic were opposed by the GOP-controlled legislature and squashed by Wisconsin’s conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

And a push to extend absentee balloting was also shot down by a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that was supported by the justices nominated by Republican presidents and opposed by those nominated by Democrats.

With the state under a stay-at-home order, thousands of poll workers refused to show up over health concerns, forcing many cities and towns to cut the number of polling stations. Milwaukee was down to just five polling sites from the original 180.

Even though the National Guard stepped in to provide some assistance, long lines instantly formed as the polls opened, with many voters waiting hours to cast a ballot. In many instances, social distancing was extremely difficult to maintain.

Democrats in Wisconsin and across the nation decried the rulings to carry on with the in-person voting during the pandemic.

The partisan fight in Wisconsin the past few days is the first battle in the broader political war between Democrats and Republicans over expanding voting by mail and absentee balloting for November’s general election.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden recently predicted “there’s going to be a great deal more absentee balloting” in the general election. And last week the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee emphasized in a “Today” show appearance that it’s time to start looking into what it “would take to have voting by mail.”

The $2 trillion economic stimulus package passed by Congress and signed into law by the president two weeks ago – which aims to help workers, small businesses and large companies devastated by the shutdown of much of the nation’s economy due to the pandemic, as well as provide aid to hospitals on the front lines in the crisis – also included $400 million to help states move toward mail-in voting.

Senate Democrats had pushed for $2 billion in election funding, with House Democrats angling for double that amount. Congressional Democrats say they’ll work to increase funding in the next stimulus package.

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A study from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice released last month spotlighted sweeping changes to current voting practices across the country – such as universal mail-in voting, ballot drive-by drop off boxes from coast to coast, and easier online voter registration – to make voting in November safe. Their price tag to implement the changes was $2 billion.

The push by Democrats will face plenty of opposition from the president and Republicans, who’ve long opposed moves to expand voting by mail and early voting by arguing that it invites voter fraud abuse. Democrats – pushing back on such arguments – say that cases of actual voter fraud are limited and claim that Republicans are trying to suppress voter turnout to improve their chances of winning elections.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel – in a recent opinion piece for Fox News – claimed that the election reforms pushed by Democrats would “vastly expand opportunities for fraud and weaken confidence in our elections, but all Washington Democrats see is a potential benefit for their party.”

The RNC and the Trump reelection campaign launched a joint multimillion-dollar legal campaign to block attempts by Democrats to change voting rules in states across the country amide the coronavirus pandemic.

The Democratic National Committee – in pushing back against the GOP efforts – is teaming up with state Democratic parties to help voters obtain absentee ballots.

“We must ensure moving forward that voters have [the] choice to either cast a ballot remotely through mail, cast a ballot through early voting, cast a ballot on Election Day,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez told reporters on Tuesday, noting some Republican governors are on board.