Voting by mail does not actually have a partisan effect.
It’s neutral.
It doesn’t help Democrats; it doesn’t help Republicans.
What it does do is boost turnout.
And so, there is this assumption that President Trump — and some other Republicans make
this assumption, as well — that if more people vote, they are more likely to lose.
I want to ask about the repeated attacks on vote-by-mail by people, of course, other than
by President Trump, by Republicans claiming to be attacking voter fraud.
In Georgia, the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has announced
an absentee ballot fraud task force to investigate signature mismatches and other issues.
In your New York Times Magazine piece, you quote Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action,
who says the task force is “a submission to the Trump voter-suppression machine.”
Explain.
So, yes.
In Georgia, I think the concern of voting rights advocates, like Lauren Groh-Wargo,
is that people will hear they’re going to be investigated if they vote by mail, and
they’ll get nervous about it.
And that will intimidate them in a way that will discourage voting.
I think it’s also important to connect this to a longtime voter suppression tactic among conservatives.
So, you go back to the '60s, you had poll taxes, literacy tests,
to try to prevent African Americans from voting.
Then we have the Voting Rights Act.
It becomes illegal to do things like that.
But you start to see a push for voter identification at the polls.
And the justification for voter ID laws was we're preventing fraud.
So, it turns out there’s almost no fraud at the polls.
If you think about it, it would be really hard to turn an election by having people
show up and vote twice.
You’d need a lot of people to do that and get away with it.
It just isn’t really a problem.
And so, that does not stop conservatives and a lot of Republicans, however, from making
this charge over and over again.
We’re seeing it now with a complaint about voting by mail, even though states like Secretary
Griswold’s, with a really good track record and practically universal voting by mail,
have very low levels of fraud.
And you also see it with something called purging, which is this idea of cleaning up
the voter rolls by cutting people off of them if they haven’t voted for a while or if
their names don’t exactly match in other databases.
And similarly, the rationale given for purging the rolls is to prevent fraud.
But the reality of fraud is just much, much smaller — really tiny — compared to the
amount of people who end up with barriers to voting for these reasons.
Emily Bazelon, is the Trump campaign spending its election money on efforts to limit voting by mail?
There is at least $10 [million], I think now it’s up to $20 million, that the Republican
National Committee has set aside for lawsuits relating to the election.
You know, this is perfectly normal.
The Democrats are spending money on lawsuits, too.
But the Republicans are doing things like challenging an all-vote-by-mail primary in
New Mexico, a conservative group challenging a similar effort in Nevada.
And then we also are seeing the Republicans just gear up for election monitoring, for
their efforts on the day of the election, for the people who do vote at the polls, you
know, perhaps to interfere with their right to vote.
That is something that has happened in the past.
They’ve been blocked from doing what’s called ballot security for many years because
of a consent decree they agreed to in the 1980s.
But that consent decree will be gone for the first presidential election in 40 years.
And so that’s another potential for spending this kind of money on.
The military has been doing mail-in voting for what?
Two hundred years?
Well, yeah.
It started in the Civil War.
You’re right.
That’s where we get the idea of absentee balloting from.
There was actually a struggle through World War I and World War II over how much absentee
balloting soldiers would be able to do.
But yes, they have been doing it this way for a long time.