During Trump’s latest propaganda show, he was asked whether he can substantiate his claim that mail-in voting is “corrupt” and “dangerous” and “fraudulent,” plus “horrible” and dangerous” and rife with “cheaters.”
He replied: “I think there’s a lot of evidence.”
Again he was asked for proof.
He replied: “We’re going to find out about the proof…I’ll provide you with some…there’s evidence being compiled.”
Remember, years ago, when he said he’d sent detectives to Hawaii, to expose President Obama’s birth fraud? He should summon them home, put them to work on mail fraud. Or maybe he’ll farm out that project to an intern from Trump University.
There is zero evidence to support Trump’s demagogic lie that “mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country,” zero evidence that the 34 states with at-home voting are plagued by cheaters. But it’s easy to understand why Trump is terrified that mail ballots might be embraced nationwide as a solution to the pandemic, as a smart way to safeguard the public’s health in the constitutionally-required November election.
As mail-ballot states like Oregon have demonstrated, mail ballots drive up turnout. And the higher the November turnout, the greater the chance that the clout of his cultists will be diluted, the greater the chance he’ll be ousted, and the greater the chance he’ll become a private citizen vulnerable to prosecution.
Every once in a while, Trump inadvertently commits candor. He did it recently on Fox & Friends, when he said it’d be “crazy” to federally endorse a nationwide vote-by-mail option. Why would it be crazy? Because mail ballots would spark “levels of voting that, if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” How refreshing it was to hear an unvarnished articulation of the Trump-GOP voter suppression credo.
So welcome to what will likely be the defining political battle of 2020.
Trump is vowing to “fight very hard” to thwart any mail ballot expansion, to thus rig the game and hike the odds of hanging onto the office he daily besmirches. Deep down inside, where his feral instinct thrives, he rightly intuits that there’s a multitude of voters who are thirsting to hold him accountable for his manifest failures before and during the pandemic, failures that have cost thousands of American lives. Anything he can do to minimize that electorate, he will do it. And his servile congressional Republicans will mimic his lies; witness the House GOPer who tweeted the other day that “universal vote-by-mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.”
Speaking of Trump’s lies, this was a doozy yesterday: “I don’t have to tell you, you can look the statistics – there’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting, mail-in ballots.” How so? “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place. You look at what they do, where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it.”
There’s a lot to unpack in those remarks, most of it worthless and incoherent (including a reference to the world’s biggest living room), but he appears to be saying that it’s routine to have massive forgeries on mail ballots, and that “statistics” back him up. There are no such statistics.
But there was a House election scandal two years ago, in North Carolina, where some sleazy operatives collected lots of absentee ballots – disproportionately from black and low-income voters, natch – and promptly dumped them in the trash. Take a guess which party the operatives were working for.
Bingo! According to sworn affidavits, the GOP hired a convicted felon to trash those absentee ballots and tilt a House race to the Republican candidate. As a result, the state Board of Elections refused to certify the GOP’s 900-vote victory. That’s the closest thing to what Trump was talking about yesterday, and somehow he neglected to mention it.
Anyway, if there were indeed any “statistics” on widespread mail ballot fraud, surely Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity would have compiled them and yesterday he would have quoted them. Does anybody even remember that “integrity” commission, which Trump created with great fanfare in May ’17? It was supposed to substantiate his lie that five million illegal voters had stolen his popular vote victory. Turns out, it met only two or three times, came up with nothing, and was disbanded seven months later. But hey, its stint was five months longer than Trump Steaks.
The goal of mail ballot expansion should be obvious: to give as many Americans as possible a safe way to participate in the democratic process at a time when the coronavirus may still make it too dangerous to congregate in person. People should not have to risk their health to exercise the franchise. If Trump and the Republicans fear they can’t win with a sizeable electorate, perhaps they should ask themselves why that’s so.