Trump keeps blasting mail-in voting
Donald Trump, the nation’s most outspoken critic of mail voting, continued his assault on the practice last week, trashing it as rife with fraud — even as Republicans who want to see him elected president again tell his supporters to sign and participate in voting-by-mail.
Trump was clear Tuesday night in a Fox town hall: “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” he said, adding “If you have it, you’re going to have fraud.”
His anti-mail voting stand isn’t new. It was a constant for much of the 2020 campaign, in which he lost reelection.
But it’s a stand that could hurt Republicans — including Trump — in the 2024 elections by tamping down GOP voters’ interest in voting by mail.
A day after his assertions of fraud, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. — an early and prominent Trump supporter — said in an email blast that Republicans should “get ready to defeat Joe Biden and the Radical Left by requesting your vote-by-mail ballot TODAY.” Scott would presumably be helped if Florida Republicans get their votes in via mail since he’s up for reelection this fall.
On Thursday, the Palm Beach County Republican Party had a similar message, assuring people that Trump “came out in support of Vote-by-Mail and Early In-Person Voting in states that allow it.”
And months ago, Trump himself urged his supporters to request mail ballots for the 2024 election in a highly scripted video as part of a broad Republican party “bank your vote” campaign.
So which is it: Riddled with fraud? Or vital for Trump and
other Republicans who hope to win elections?
No fraud
Despite Trump’s comments on Tuesday, and his stream of complaints during and after the 2020 campaign, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, according to a range of government officials, political analysts and partisan campaign operatives.
Multiple investigations, including those conducted by Republicans, have uncovered nothing more than sporadic minor instances around the country and in Florida — where incidents have involved Republicans as well as Democrats.
“Voting by mail is extremely secure as a method of voting. States have numerous safeguards to ensure it is not abused. And incidents of misconduct or irregularities are extremely rare,” said Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program.
Ever since Florida made voting-by-mail easier, it’s been overseen by Republican secretaries of state, elected in the past and now appointed by governors, who have all been Republicans.
To vote by mail, Clapman said, people use paper ballots, which are retained and can be recounted, or audited if there is a suspicion of irregularities. Florida doesn’t do mass mailings of ballots. Individual requests are required from each voter.
And people sign their return envelopes, and staffers in county elections offices match the signature to what voters have on file in their records. (In Florida, ballots have been rejected if spouses accidentally sign each other’s return ballot envelope, which means the signatures don’t match what’s on file for each individual.)
Clapman pointed to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which tried to estimate the number of questionable mail-in ballots. The results, she said maybe one ballot out of every 1.7 million cast. “That gives you a sense of how infinitesimally small this risk is.”
Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, is a nationally recognized expert on voting.
“The evidence simply isn’t there,” McDonald said about suggestions of widespread voter fraud. “Is there some fraud? Of course. If 100 million people do something, you’re going to have some instances of fraud, no matter what it is. But it’s not widespread, organized fraud. It is really isolated incidents, lone-wolf type of fraud.”
Widespread use
Florida voters have embraced mail voting. It began with a change in state law as part of the reforms that came in the aftermath of the disrupted, ultra-close 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Florida voters can request a mail ballot without having to cite a reason. Under the old system, called absentee voting, someone had to have a reason, such as being out of town on Election Day.
The biggest Florida users for most of the last two decades: Republicans. And mail voting was one of the most potent weapons for Florida Republicans, helping the party rack up win after win while Democrats used to prefer in-person early voting.
But that all changed in 2020. Democrats — who polling showed were more concerned than Republicans about COVID — moved en masse to voting by mail. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats were much more likely to eschew any kind of in-person voting (at regional early voting centers or at neighborhood polling places on Election Day).
On the offensive
With mail voting shaping up as an advantage for Democrats in 2020, Trump went on the offensive against the practice, and Republican skepticism of mail-voting started increasing in Florida and elsewhere.
At political rallies, during official events at the White House, and in missives posted on social media, Trump claimed again and again that mail voting was “a very dangerous thing for this country,” “fraudulent in many cases,” “horrible,” “corrupt,” and “a terrible thing.”
After Trump spent months criticizing mail voting in 2020, Florida Republicans were showing reluctance to sign up for mail ballots that year. So he reversed course over the summer — at least as far as Florida was concerned — and said he thought mail voting was good in the Sunshine State.
McDonald said Trump’s stand emanated from pandemic politics.
“Trump did not want to admit that the pandemic was something of concern. And so when blue states were taking precautionary measures and adopting mail balloting as a precautionary measure, he didn’t want to let that message out,” McDonald said.
Trump and his wife, Melania, both used mail ballots in the March 2020 presidential primary and in the August 2020 state and local primaries and nonpartisan elections. (The Trumps didn’t use the mail. Instead they had someone deliver their mail ballots to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office.)
They became registered Republican voters in Palm Beach County since 2019, when the president announced he was changing his official residence after he got mad at his home state of New York.