Trump Could Help Making Voting by Mail Easier. Why Won't He?
You can't have a normal election by pretending there is no pandemic.

President Trump’s delay-the-election trial balloon on Twitter last week was resoundingly denounced, and rightly so.
Indeed, so thorough was the repudiation, including from top Republicans, that the president backtracked a little. “I don’t want to delay,” Trump explained in a press conference to discuss the pandemic. “I want to have the election. But I also don’t want to have to wait for three months and then find out that the ballots are all missing, and the election doesn’t mean anything. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Although delaying the election is an abhorrent idea, contrary to what this country stands for, Trump does have a point about mail-in-voting. It could well be a disaster. What’s astounding (though not actually surprising) is that the president doesn’t want to do anything about it.
First, let me explain why Trump has a point. Although his claims of massive and systemic fraud are ill-founded and irresponsible, his point about the vote counting has merit.
New York City’s June 23 primary was—or rather, still is—something of a train wreck. About 10 times the normal number of voters cast their ballots by mail. The system was overwhelmed. As of this writing, there’s still an undecided congressional race 42 days after the voting was supposed to end.
I’m generally opposed to widespread voting by mail because I think Election Day is an important civic ritual, and early voting, particularly in primaries, can end up thwarting popular will. That opposition melts away during a pandemic, of course, but the fact is that mail-in balloting has never been tried on the scale that might be required come November.
The five states that are already vote-by-mail only—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah—should be fine. But in other states it might be a hot mess. Not only could ballot-counting efforts be overwhelmed, but the post office could be as well, causing ballots to be lost or excessively delayed.
Many argue that Trump is making a tactical mistake in attacking mail-in balloting. Republicans have spent years building up their vote-by-mail operations, leaving Democrats far behind. Launching a campaign to discredit a system well suited to harvest votes from the disproportionately older and rural voters making up Trump’s base seems like madness.
On the other hand, as my colleague Sarah Isgur notes, a hot mess could actually be in Trump’s interest. Absentee ballots are rejected—purely for technical reasons, such as failing to fill out a line on the form—at a higher rate than those cast in person. And if Democrats trust mail-in balloting and Republicans don’t, more Democrats are likely to vote by mail—and have more of their ballots rejected as a result. In Wisconsin’s April primary, some 23,000 absentee ballots were thrown out. In 2016, Trump carried Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
What’s remarkable, though, is that most of the conversation is about Trump’s political or psychological needs and not his obligations as president. It’s been made clear to him that moving the election is a non-starter. What’s his response? To preemptively discredit the election results. Even his complaints about the problems with mail-in voting are couched not in his obligations as chief executive to see that the integrity of our elections be preserved, but in partisan grievance. He’s tweeted about a “CORRUPT ELECTION” that will “LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY.”
If Trump is so concerned about the legitimacy of the election, why not, you know, do something to assure the election is conducted properly?
There’s nothing stopping Trump from pushing a massive effort to, say, gear up the U.S. Postal Service to handle an increased volume of mail during the election period. Instead, the donor he appointed to run the USPS has eliminated overtime for postal workers, virtually ensuring delivery delays. Trump could also use the same emergency powers he’s used to acquire ventilators to buy secure ballot drop boxes for the states.
Instead, on Monday, he raised the possibility of issuing an executive order to force states not to use vote-by-mail. As with moving Election Day, he has no such power.
Putting aside plausible theories that Trump is laying a foundation to claim he was robbed of re-election, his response is of a piece with his pandemic denial. Just as you can’t get the schools reopened or the economy revived without dealing with the pandemic, you can’t have a normal election by just pretending there’s no pandemic. Predicting it will “just disappear” isn’t a strategy.
But rather than face that reality and take appropriate action, Trump prefers to carp as if his hands are tied—but his fingers are free to tweet.
Photograph by Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images.
Trump is content with the chaos. It’s the only card he can play. It is truly astounding and frightening that our President is an impediment to free and fair (and orderly, safe and accurate) elections. He actively seeks to undermine our democracy just so his sorry rear end can remain in the White House for four more years. The man is disgusting. How any conservative can vote for him is beyond me.
To understand the abject evil that is unfolding before us, step back and take a look at what Trump and the Republicans are accomplishing here a whole.
Trump, Barr, and Russian propaganda are all saying the same thing over and over again, thousands of times a day to Americans: our election system cannot be trusted, the results in November will be fake, and in fact Trump and the Republicans should have won majorities.
Republicans are doing this because they think they are going to lose, and they see this as a way to poison the well for Democrats when they take power in Washington.
But instead of poisoning Democrats, they are poisoning our entire system of government. They are creating a country that is *more* polarized than it already is, nastier, more dangerous, and more unstable.
Which is why Putin is helping, and for all we know he was the one who cooked this whole idea up, based on the many phone calls Trump and Putin have had over the last four months.
I get that Trump supporters want Trump to win. Is it worth trading away the stability and strength of your country? The USA won't devolve into a dictatorship in this international environment: we won't make it that far. Our country will be taken to the international chop shop and sold for parts the minute we stop operating as a unified country from the military standpoint.
Along the way we'll see massive commercial and stock market disruption as whole sections of the country cut economic ties with other sections, those sections defined by either lines on a map or "physchographic profiles" in a database. "Democrat only business" or "Republican only business" could be what history will remember America had shortly before it was broken up.
This is the order of magnitude of damage to our country Republicans are risking right now. They don't seem to care. They trust their leader not to do anything so catastrophic, but he's an amoral idiot, and he would neither know nor care about the destruction he has wrought.