There’s a brutally simple reason President Donald Trump is sounding false warnings about the 2020 election being rigged.
He and the GOP have only one hope to survive: voter suppression. With the majority of voters poised to reject Trump, only a weak turnout will give the president and his fellow Republican extremists a chance of eking out enough votes from their base supporters to win.
So Trump Twitter-screams about voter fraud conspiracies that have been proven untrue again and again. He spreads lunacy about mail balloting being rife with tampering, which isn’t true. His personal lawyer William Barr — OK, Barr is technically the attorney general — claims a foreign government could flood areas with fake mail-in ballots and hijack the vote.
Frankly, this sounds like Barr signaling to others how to meddle, rather than being worried about it. If this is a concern of his, why does the GOP Senate consistently refuse to pass legislation aimed at protecting our vote? If Republicans took vote-by-mail security seriously, they would strengthen laws to jail people found to mail phony ballots. They won’t because using fake mailers to dupe Americans and hijack their views is a specific Republican technique. Let’s all remember that the Republican National Committee sent fake census forms to millions of households to suppress census responses this year.
The Republicans’ desperate dream is that they can pressure voting officials into curtailing mail-in balloting in hopes of weakening the turnout due to voters being reluctant to go to the polls in a pandemic. And if the GOP can then press officials into limiting the number of polling places, that will have a further chilling effect.
Clearly these are some of the many steps Republicans will use to disenfranchise as many voters as possible. Happily, so far the strategy has backfired: Iowa, Georgia and Kentucky, states the GOP has targeted for extensive suppression efforts, all delivered record turnouts in their primaries. Why? Simple. Voters are nearly stumbling over themselves to vote out Trump and defy Republican efforts to strip Americans of their rights to vote.
The truth is that mail-in balloting has been used for years to allow voting by military personnel and other absentee voters, and as of yet there’s been no evidence of rampant fraud involved in it. In a recent guest column for The Hill, the directors of the National Vote at Home Institute and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab provided numbers that summed up the situation in stark detail: Of the more than 250 million ballots cast by mail over the past 20 years, there have been 142 criminal convictions for fraud related to those ballots. That’s a fraud rate of 0.00006%.
With all of this in mind, it’s critically important that Americans everywhere rally behind efforts to ensure fair access to the vote and as easy a process as possible to encourage participation. The solution to any problem in a democracy is more democracy, and that means more voters.
The GOP’s efforts to restrict the vote are further evidence of its drive to perfect minority rule and silence those who disagree with them. Those efforts include outrageous gerrymandering, opposing automatic registration, starving Democratic-leaning areas of polling places, disqualifying ballots over exaggerated technical violations, and more.
All the while the Republicans shout false claims about widescale voter fraud that costs their party millions of votes. It’s patently ridiculous. When Trump commissioned a federal task force after the 2016 election to sniff out voter fraud, it shut down within a matter of months after finding nothing.
Remember too that mail-in balloting comes with security measures attached. In Clark County, voting by mail requires a signature on the outside of the sealed ballot that must match both the one on the ballot and the one on file in the election office. If there’s not a match, or if there’s another problem with the ballot, it’s put aside so election officials can contact the voter to go over the problems.
But if people are worried about mail-in fraud, let’s strengthen the protections by adding extra steps to ensure that all valid votes are counted, and all questionable signatures are thoroughly vetted before ballots are tossed out.
County election officials did additional vetting on several thousand ballots for that very reason. The process took several weeks, but the officials did their due diligence to ensure the votes were legitimate. This should be a national guarantee and not simply rely on the exceptional dedication to the vote we enjoy in Clark County.
The fact is that if there’s anybody to fear as an election risk in November, it’s Trump and the Republicans.
With Trump’s approval ratings in the tank, including in key states where he narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, he knows he can’t win a legitimate election unless something drastic happens.
And meanwhile, he keeps sinking into his hatred, digging himself into a deeper hole by demonizing peaceful protesters, supporting white nationalists, etc.
Suppressing the vote and spreading doubt about its fairness is all he’s got left. As the tent shrinks in the party of Trump, the only way for him to win is by reducing the voter pool so that the majority is weakened andhis core supporters can carry him.
Americans must fight this by giving election officials the resources they need to register as many eligible voters as possible and allow them to vote safely and securely.