VOTE BY MAIL 101
Photo credit: Karin Schall
Vote by mail is the same thing as an absentee ballot, and voting rules vary by state.
Five states currently conduct all elections entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. Oregon ranks near top of country in voter turnout
Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Indiana, and West Virginia do not allow vote by mail now.
All other states allow absentee voting with some restrictions. You must request an application for an absentee ballot to be mailed to you in some places, including New York. In some states you have to give a reason, such as illness or being out of the country on election day.
More info here: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/all-mail-elections.aspx
Every state needs vote by mail, for several reasons: Poll workers are often older retired people. Each worker could face hundreds of voters face to face, risking infection of coronavirus. Voters will be crowded into polling places, touching the voting machines, which will have to be cleaned . Nobody should have to risk illness or death when we have a safe, stay-at-home option.
Voting by mail is not new or scary: Americans have voted by mail since the Civil War, including millions of military members posted overseas. Republicans claim to fear widespread voter fraud, but the only recent proven case of voter fraud was by Republicans in North Carolina’s 9 District in 2018.
Trump and Vote by Mail
Trump’s opposition to voting by mail is based on nothing but fear of a robust voter turnout. If the United States switched to all-mail voting, he said, out loud, in April, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Yet there is no evidence that vote by mail favors either party. In the recent California Congressional primary, the Republican beat the Democrat in a district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans. One reason may be that older Americans are likelier to be Republican and to use the United States Postal Service.
Trump himself has voted absentee in three elections: the NYC Mayoral Election in 2017, the NY Midterm election in 2018 and the Florida primary in 2020.
Yet he threatened to “hold up” federal funding to Michigan and Nevada in response to the states’ plans to increase voting by mail to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus. Without evidence, Trump called the two states’ plans “illegal.” Trump later retracted the threat to withhold aid.
His lies about voting by mail were so fact-checkable that Twitter, for the first time, put a fact check label on a pair of "misleading" tweets by President Donald Trump.
Court battles
The RNC is now involved in suits on mail-in ballots in Florida, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, California, Arizona and Iowa. They have a $20 billion legal budget to fight Democratic lawsuits.
What does all this mean for the November election? Health experts say that we will still have the Covid pandemic in November.
A majority of voters — 58 percent — favor nationwide reform of election rules that would allow all eligible voters to cast their ballots by mail. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 58% of voters favor a change in the law regulating absentee voting. And nearly 70 percent say that all voters should be able to mail in their ballots this November because coronavirus may still be a major public health threat this fall.
To prepare for expanded vote by mail means a tremendous amount to preparation and expense. That should start now.
The HEROES act, already passed by the House, will provide $25 billion in emergency funding for the US Postal Service. Without that funding the postal service may not exist for the election in November. The recently introduced Postal Service Emergency Assistance Act would provide similar emergency funding. Please call your Senators and demand they provide at least $25 billion in emergency funding to the USPS immediately. If you live in a blue state, ask friends and relatives in states with conservative Senators to make those calls. The election may depend on it.