This week, Donald Trump tweeted that voting by mail is “substantially fraudulent” and would lead to a “rigged” election in November. He has denounced mail-in voting before, and, during a week when the President also repeatedly smeared the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough over a false murder accusation, his latest misstatements seemed, by his debased norms, prosaic. Yet, after years of allowing Trump’s falsehoods to pass unremarked, Twitter called B.S. on the President: it planted a small exclamation mark beneath two of Trump’s tweets about voting and urged his followers to “get the facts about mail-in ballots,” via links to news stories. The articles pointed out that, though fraudulent mail-in voting does occur, it has taken place on a tiny scale in comparison to the number of votes that have been mailed. Twitter later explained that the President’s tweets “could confuse voters.” That is true, and on Friday the company also found it necessary to warn that Trump’s tweet about the crisis in Minneapolis violated its rules about “glorifying violence”—though none of that explains why it had waited so long to flag the President’s false tweets. In any event, Twitter’s fact-checking was necessary: Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots are plainly designed to suppress a well-established, convenient method of voting, whose expansion during the coronavirus pandemic has allowed millions of citizens to exercise their constitutional rights without risking their health.
It can be difficult to divine why Trump promotes a particular line of lies. About voting by mail, the President has opined that, if it became entrenched, “you’d never have another Republican elected in this country.” That’s another statement that should be flagged, since studies by social scientists have shown repeatedly that mail-in voting until now has not substantially benefit Democrats over Republicans. It isn’t clear how much Trump and his allies are persuaded that more mail-in voting would hurt their party, because it would enfranchise new Democratic voters, and how much they are exaggerating the threat to fire up supporters and discredit the election. In any event, they are battling a strong tide: even before the pandemic, voting by mail had been increasing around the country. Five states now conduct elections almost entirely by mail, and twenty-nine others and the District of Columbia allow unrestricted absentee balloting. Since March, in reaction to the pandemic, Rhode Island is among the states that have dramatically enlarged mail-in voting, while in states where the practice is already prevalent, such as Arizona, there have been increases in participation.
The surge in voting by mail this year has protected voters from the coronavirus, but it has also exacerbated problems in the nation’s patchwork, underfunded election system—and that, in fact, may portend trouble in November. Local government bodies administer our elections; on the whole, they act with nonpartisan integrity, but many are poorly equipped to handle the tsunami of mailed ballots that may hit them this fall, even if the coronavirus fades. In March, Congress authorized four hundred million dollars to support elections this year, including voting by mail, but election specialists say that is far short of what is needed. We might want to brace ourselves: Election Night, on November 3rd, may stretch into days or even weeks without a clear Presidential winner, as beleaguered election boards in battleground states tabulate mounds of mailed ballots. Last October, Pennsylvania adopted unrestricted absentee voting for the first time, and some of its election authorities are expecting difficulty. “No county wants to be the reason we don’t know the leader of the free world on election night,” Lee Soltysiak, the election clerk of Montgomery County, outside of Philadelphia, told the Philadelphia Inquirer recently, but “that’s the position . . . we’re all likely to be in” if the vote is close. Another official told the Inquirer that at least four days might be required to count mailed ballots. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, told the Associated Press last week that her state would likely need “several days” in November.
All this sounds like a prescription for a national nervous breakdown—or worse. Picture armed activists protesting outside vote-counting sites, while partisan lawyers wave court injunctions and the President unleashes tweetstorms. If Trump fears that he is in danger of losing the election in the weeks before November 3rd, will he mobilize allies to stoke disarray on voting day, or use allegations of voter fraud to declare some sort of emergency? He has options. This year, the President has effectively seized political control of the United States Postal Service. The service has forecast that it could run out of money by September, because of the economic collapse caused by the coronavirus. A stimulus bill enacted in March authorized the Treasury Department to lend the service up to ten billion dollars, but no deal has been struck, and, according to the Washington Post, the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has used loan negotiations to demand changes in postal operations. A former finance chair of the Republican National Committee now chairs the Postal Service’s governing board. That board recently appointed Louis DeJoy, another major Trump donor, as Postmaster General. Trump has long advocated for selling off the Postal Service and recently called it “a joke.” The coup that he and his allies have carried out seems designed to advance privatization and related goals. Having succeeded in taking control, Trump could conceivably seek to influence or disrupt postal operations to advantage his reëlection. Already, the service sometimes struggles to deliver large volumes of mailed ballots on time. This spring, mail delays roiled elections in Arizona and Wisconsin.
It is usually a mistake to attribute forethought to Trump; he is a blustering counter-puncher who imagines himself to be a genius at political improvisation. After Twitter called him out this week, the President raged characteristically; he accused the company of “stifling FREE SPEECH” and hastily signed an executive order designed to punish Twitter and other social-media companies if their efforts to police lies on their platforms—about mail voting or anything else—offend Trump or his allies. Yet, for all his impulsiveness, Trump charts a consistent direction, toward chaos, which he then seeks to exploit to his advantage. Joe Biden’s candidacy promises a restoration of normalcy, whatever that may mean amid a pandemic and the loss of a hundred thousand lives and forty million jobs in a matter of months. To regain power, Biden and the Democratic Party will have to win an election that is already one of the more abnormal in American history, against an unscrupulous incumbent holding the most powerful office in the free world. The integrity of the Presidency and the health of the Constitution are at stake in November, but this is not shaping up as an election for idealists or the faint at heart.
