During his visit to a Ford Motor Company plant in Michigan last month, President Donald Trump took time out from reviewing the plant’s conversion to ventilator production to toss out a few zingers about a different kind of conversion – the pivot of some states, particularly in the face of a global pandemic, to a vote-by-mail system.
“We’re not going to go to vote-by-mail,” Trump vowed. “Vote-by-mail is fraught with fraud and abuse.”
All spring long, the President had unleashed a barrage of anti-vote-by-mail tweets and comments reiterating baseless claims. In April, he took time during a White House coronavirus briefing to deliver another denunciation: “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room signing ballots all over the place. I think mail-in voting is a terrible thing.”
Even when they’re outlandishly hyperbolic, the President’s continuous diatribes against vote-by-mail have compounded into a stance that seems to have congealed among his base. So, just as attitudes over public health precautions like wearing masks or reopening beaches and businesses seem to be drawn along ever more partisan lines this year, now the crucial matter of conducting safe elections is becoming an increasingly red-blue debate.
This is an untenable state of affairs for a nation that considers itself the world’s flagship democracy, and it deserves to be scrutinized. Let’s take a look at a couple of different examples of what’s going wrong and who’s trying to fix it.
Unless you were living under a rock in April, you couldn’t have missed the Spring Election debacle in Wisconsin.
Vote-by-Mail | A Reality Check
by Barbara Lloyd McMichael
A global pandemic, riots in the streets, disinformation campaigns, the systematic dismantling of our national postal system, a presidential election year – and perhaps a remedy or two.