Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-interested reasons for opposing mail-in voting

“For whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

President Donald Trump keeps saying the quiet part loud when it comes to his opposition to mail-in voting.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, sending in ballots by mail has become a more enticing option for obvious reasons — it means people can safely cast their vote from home and not risk getting sick traveling to and from traveling polling places.

But in Trump’s mind, mail-in voting has a major downside. Because it’s so easy, it increases voter turnout. And increased turnout typically helps Democrats. (There’s little evidence that mail-in voting disproportionately helps Democrats, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and other Republicans from opposing it on a partisan basis.)

On Wednesday morning, Trump came very close to admitting this. In response to something he saw on Fox & Friends, Trump tweeted that “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting,” adding that “for whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

That tweet marked the second time in just over a week that Trump basically gave up the game. During a Fox & Friends appearance on March 30, he explained his opposition to a Democratic proposal to include funding for mail-in voting in coronavirus stimulus legislation by saying, “they have things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Trump’s claim is false. Several states where Republicans have a lot of success, including deep-red Utah, have already moved toward systems where mail-in voting is easy and uncontroversial. Trump, however, has a longstanding animus toward any form of voting that doesn’t require presenting some form of identification at a polling place.

And he’s not alone. During a recent interview, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, a Republican, said the quiet part even louder than Trump has.

“Vote by mail in my view is not acceptable,” Ralston said. “This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia. … This will certainly drive up turnout.”

Trump’s objections to mail-in voting consist of a pack of lies

Mail-in voting has become a major topic of conversation this week because of Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin. Amid the pandemic, Democrats pushed for the election to be delayed. A federal judge ordered the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to be extended, but that ruling was ultimately stymied by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, who ordered on Monday that the election go on as scheduled and that absentee ballots be postmarked by April 7 in order to be counted.

What ensued were dystopian scenes of long lines of mask-wearing people queuing to vote at the few polling places that remained open in cities like Milwaukee — hardly the type of images you want to see during a pandemic where people are being advised to stay home.

Trump, however, was unbothered by it. When the topics of Wisconsin’s election and mail-in voting came up during Tuesday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing, he responded with a pack of lies.

First, he falsely claimed Wisconsin Democrats only pushed to have the election delayed after he endorsed a Republican candidate for a state Supreme Court seat.

Then, alluding to the federal judge’s decision that would’ve extended mail-in voting by a week, Trump said, “mail ballots — they cheat, okay? People cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters.”

“You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place. No,” Trump added later. “I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing. I think if you vote, you should go vote.”

Suffice it to say that Trump’s story about “thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room” and committing election fraud via mail-in ballots is made up. Ironically, the closest approximation to something like that happening took place in North Carolina in 2018, when Republican Mark Harris benefited from a well-funded and sophisticated plot to tamper with absentee ballots. A new election was ultimately called and that congressional seat is currently occupied by Republican Rep. Dan Bishop.

The North Carolina race was the exception to the rule. Like any mode of voting, mail-in voting isn’t impervious to fraud, but done correctly, it comes pretty darn close. A 2019 article written by Spenser Mestel for the Pacific Standard details the impressive measures Oregon has taken to safeguard mail-in ballots.

In Oregon, both the absentee envelope and ballot have a barcode unique to each voter, and in the larger counties, like Marion, a machine scans for any discrepancies between the two, or any duplicate barcodes. Then, a team of election workers trained in forensic handwriting analyzes the ballot signatures to verify the identification of the voter, who has two weeks to prove her identity should the signature be contested.

During this process, “everything that is happening is on camera at all times,” says Tayleranne Gillespie, the communications director for the Oregon Secretary of State. “No one’s ever by themselves counting ballots. It’s always done in bipartisan teams.”

But facing an increasingly perilous reelection fight, Trump not only can use every vote he can get, but also every vote that the eventual Democratic nominee doesn’t get. Especially during a pandemic that may extend into the fall, discouraging mail-in voting is one means toward that end — even if the consequence is that Americans are forced into a choice between voting and risking contracting a deadly virus.

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