The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.
Mr. Trump was not shy about it. He told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network last Thursday that he was pushing back against Democrats’ demand for further U.S.P.S. funding in the latest Covid-19 relief bill: “Now they need that money in order to have the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots …. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
While targeting the U.S. Postal Service may be new, the threat to election integrity coming from Mr. Trump is not. But there are steps we can take right now to assure a fair election in November.
Mr. Trump has made at least 91 attacks on the integrity of voting so far this year (and more than 700 since 2012) and backed up his complaints about mail-in ballots with lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Iowa. He has repeatedly tweeted the unsupported claim that increased use of mail-in ballots in November, necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, will lead to voter fraud and a rigged election.
Back in May he wrote that “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed….” He said that with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California sending ballots to all active registered voters, which he terms “universal mail-in” voting, “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”
The end game here is a bit curious because Republicans traditionally have relied on mail-in balloting to get out the vote, and there are already signs that Republican turnout might be hurt by his rantings. How else to explain the president seeking to distinguish between good “absentee” voting and bad “mail-in” balloting and urging Floridians to vote by mail? And how else to explain the president not only repeatedly voting by mail but using a third person — what Mr. Trump refers to as “ballot harvesting” — to deliver his own ballot to election officials in the Florida primary on Tuesday?
The most benign explanation for Mr. Trump’s obsessive focus on mail-in balloting is that he is looking for an excuse for a possible loss to his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, in November. The less benign explanation is that he is seeking to sow chaos to drive down turnout and undermine the legitimacy of the election, laying the groundwork for contesting a close election if he loses. I fear that the latter explanation is correct, and that makes it all the more urgent that election administrators, the media and others take steps to avoid a crisis of confidence in the 2020 election results.
The benign explanation for Mr. Trump’s conduct — that it will assuage his ego in the event of a loss to Mr. Biden — is consistent with how Mr. Trump explained his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Although the president won in the Electoral College, he lost the popular vote nationally by about 3 million votes. It seems not a coincidence that Mr. Trump claimed to David Muir of ABC News, without any evidence whatsoever, that 3 million to 5 million noncitizens voted in the 2016 elections, all for Clinton: “None of ’em come to me. None of ’em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of ’em come to me.”
He has now turned from unsubstantiated claims of massive noncitizen voting to claims that mail-in ballots will lead to “rigged” and “substantially fraudulent” elections. No doubt he has made this shift because mail-in balloting is set to explode thanks to the pandemic making polling place voting a potential health risk. In Georgia, for example, the state had approximately 37,000 voters vote by mail in the 2016 primaries and more than 1 million voted by mail in the June 9 primary.
Here, too, Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud are unsupported by the evidence. Absentee ballot fraud is rare; one study found fewer than 500 prosecutions nationwide during a 12 year period in which voters cast over a billion ballots; most of those cases were not aimed at changing election outcomes, and the ones that were tended to involve small elections when there wasn’t an active press looking for chicanery. The relative rarity of cases is no surprise because states have all kinds of security measures in place, such as signature matching, ballot tracking and statements signed under penalty of perjury.
The idea that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have raised of foreign governments sending in ballots is particularly ludicrous because it would require quickly copying the paper stock, color and ballot information specific to each voter’s ballot, getting ahold of and forging voter signatures, matching the ballot tracking information that election officials include on ballot envelopes, and doing so on a large enough scale to swing a state’s presidential election contest — all without the voters in the state whose ballots have been tampered with noticing when they go to vote and election officials tell them they have already turned in a ballot.
Indeed, coordinated mail-in ballot tampering tends to get caught quickly. An operative helping a Republican candidate in the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district has been charged with stealing and altering absentee ballots; the scheme led the bipartisan state election board to call a new election. The current scandal in Paterson, N.J., which the president has specifically called out, followed a similar pattern; a postal worker noticed an attempt to mail a stack of absentee ballots, and the ongoing investigation into the ham-handed conspiracy may well lead to criminal charges and an election do-over.
If Mr. Trump is not really concerned about fraud, what’s the real end game? His unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud may be aimed at sowing chaos during the election and depressing turnout to help his side win election. Worse, it could be calculated to delegitimize the election results, which could allow Mr. Trump to contest a close election or weaken a Biden presidency.
It is all too possible that in Michigan and Pennsylvania — two states that recently changed their laws to allow anyone who wishes to vote by mail to do so — Mr. Trump will be ahead in the counting on election night, only to see his lead evaporate days later as Philadelphia, Detroit, and other Democratic-leaning cities process a flood of absentee ballots.
A “blue shift” toward Democrats as later votes are counted is now a well-established phenomenon; as Democrats vote later, their ballots are counted later, leading to a good number of elections where Republican leads on election night turn into Democratic victories when the full and fair count ends.
Trump could claim, as he did in a 2018 U.S. Senate race in Florida, that later-counted ballots are fraudulent (a claim he abandoned when Rick Scott, a Republican, won the race). It could lead millions of his supporters to believe that Democrats stole the election, when in fact all that happened was that battleground states engaged in a close and careful count of ballots to ensure the election’s integrity.
What can be done about this? A committee I led recently issued a report, Fair Elections During a Crisis, addressing how to avoid an election meltdown in November.
To begin with, Congress needs to adequately fund the additional costs related to running an election during a pandemic. Democrats have pushed for more election funding in the latest House Covid-19 bill, but Senate Republicans, following Mr. Trump’s lead, have resisted. The White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow called adequate money for voting rights during the pandemic a “really liberal left” wish list item in the bill.
This should not be a partisan issue: Republicans, Democrats and everyone else need safe voting options in November. It’s not just the cost of mail-in balloting; safe in-person voting will be costly too and also crucial for many people. Those additional costs are going to be there whether Congress funds them or not, and lack of funding means that the election administration will be sloppier, creating fodder to feed conspiracy theories and the real risk of not being able to determine a clear winner in a close election.
Under pressure from Congress and the public, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy promised on Tuesday to defer any cuts to service in mail delivery until the election season is over. Congressional oversight can help him keep his promise.
States need to streamline procedures for the mailing out and processing of absentee ballot applications and the ballots themselves. Voters casting their ballots by mail need to request and return them as early as possible, flattening the absentee ballot curve. States should assure their deadlines for requesting mail-in ballots comport with what the Postal Service can realistically do.
All states should authorize the processing of absentee ballots before Election Day — that is, everything but the counting — to make sure they are valid. The count needs to be done quickly but carefully, and the number of outstanding ballots and all other relevant information must be made available in a transparent way, especially if the election goes into overtime.
The media needs to educate the public that the election may be “too early to call” for days after Nov. 3, and that a slow count does not equal evidence of fraud. No one should be able to claim victory until there is a clear indication of a winner given the number of outstanding ballots. Networks and cable stations need to get over the idea of being the first to call election results, and should avoid saying things like “100 percent of precincts” have reported when thousands of absentee ballots remain to be counted. Fortunately, this message is beginning to break through.
We cannot count on Mr. Trump to speak responsibly about the fairness of the 2020 vote count. Indeed, he is one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the election. He’s already tweeted that we “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” He declared in a speech in Oshkosh, Wis., on Monday that “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
But Americans can take steps to neutralize the irresponsible claims. That starts with holding a free, fair and safe election, both in person and by mail, in the midst of a pandemic. And it ends with everyone from across the political aisle rejecting any attempts to call the results of the election into question based upon nothing but a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions about voter fraud.
Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”
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