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Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge ranks among the leading Republicans who support voting by mail.
GOP support for mail voting is growing, but hard to hear over Trump
Jul 01 2020
President Trump's increasingly hyperbolic attacks on voting by mail, amplified by Attorney General William Barr and the Republican National Committee, have triggered alarms that the country is heading toward another contested election.
Trump appears to be gearing up to cast doubt on an outcome that doesn't go his way. Primaries marred by hours-long lines, voting machine malfunctions and controversies over absentee ballots have many bracing for a meltdown starting Election Day. A much bigger surge of mailed-in votes in November virtually guarantees the results won't be known for days, setting the stage for a crisis in voter confidence if the results are close enough to be challenged, as happened in 2000.
Yet for all that, voting rights advocates mobilizing to secure the election and neutralize Trump's divisive voting rhetoric have surprising and influential allies in their corner: many leading Republicans.
<p>GOP governors, Republican election officials and prominent conservatives are increasingly pushing to expand voting by mail. They're also forcefully rejecting Trump's <a href="https://apnews.com/4cf54df2ab65b4f7d0ee6d4aed774428" target="_blank">baseless claims</a> the practice is "corrupt" because it invites fraud and foreign tampering — and helps Democrats, to boot.</p><p>"I think it's very sad and very disappointing that with almost five months to go, the president seems to [want to] try to delegitimize the Nov. 3 election," former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880917081/tom-ridge-ex-dhs-sec-laments-sad-trump-fears-about-voting-by-mail" target="_blank">told NPR</a> after Trump's recent escalation of attacks on mail-in voting. A former Homeland Security secretary, Ridge co-chairs a new nonpartisan group, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/votesafe" target="_self">VoteSafe</a>, formed this spring to push to expand mail-in voting and assure safe in-person voting during this pandemic-plagued election.</p><p>When the Republican National Committee recently released an <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/rnc-ballot-harvest-vote-by-mail-ad" target="_blank">error-riddled ad</a> that suggested without evidence that voting by mail is "rigged up" to "churn out" ballots for voters with no eligibility or signature requirements, former Republican Rep. Zach Wamp of Tennessee didn't hold back. </p><p>"Shame on you!" Wamp tweeted at RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. "I've been a GOP activist at every level for 40 years. This is bull crap +our party deserves better."</p><div id="1f1b9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7ce28a7e06f199f4484411d98f371981"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-twitter-tweet-id="1275442517157097474" data-partner="rebelmouse"><div style="margin:1em 0">Shame on you @GOPChairwoman !
I’ve been a GOP activist at every level for 40 years. This is bull crap +our party de… https://t.co/71w4kaQSI2</div> — Zach Wamp (@Zach Wamp)<a href="https://twitter.com/IOWamp/statuses/1275442517157097474">1592924167.0</a></blockquote></div><p>Wamp starred in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnexJ_OmnkM" target="_blank">his own ad</a> recently as part of a $750,000 "Making Voting Safe" campaign to urge lawmakers on Capitol Hill, particularly Senate Republicans, to increase funding for election administration during the pandemic. Congress has granted the states $400 million so far. The House has voted to allocate $3.6 billion more as part of its latest, $3 trillion coronavirus economic recovery package, but the Senate will not move to negotiate a much-less-expensive alternative until late this month.</p><p><span></span>"Many Republican governors are expanding absentee voting options, and they need Congress's help," Wamp says in the ad, paid for by Issue One Action. Wamp co-chairs <a data-linked-post="2638675064" href="https://thefulcrum.us/issue-one" target="_blank">Issue One</a>'s bipartisan ReFormers Caucus of former members of Congress and administration officials promoting fixes to the political system. (The advocacy group operates The Fulcrum but has no say in its journalism.)</p><p>The Republican governors of Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Ohio have all encouraged major mail-in voting expansions in response to the pandemic.</p><p>Absentee voting has been around since the Civil War and has gained traction recently amid broad bipartisan support. Conservative Utah is one of five states to conduct its election entirely by mail. More than half the states already allow "no excuse" absentee voting, and about half of voters have cast ballots by mail this primary season, compared with 25 percent in 2018.</p><p>Absentee voting "comports with conservative principles," argues a <a href="https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Short-No.-90-Expanded-Access-to-Absentee-Ballots.pdf" target="_blank">recent white paper</a> released by the <a data-linked-post="2638673544" href="https://thefulcrum.us/r-street-institute" target="_blank">R Street Institute</a>, a generally right-leaning think tank</p><p>In "The Conservative Case for Expanded Access to Absentee Ballots," R Street scholars argue that voting absentee is partisan-neutral, cost-effective, secure, popular and inclusive of voters who are elderly and disabled. More Republicans are speaking out to defend mail-in voting in part out of self-preservation. Notes Matt Baca, director of VoteSafe: "The president is scaring his own voters away from an opportunity to cast their own ballot."</p><p>There is still plenty of partisan disagreement over mail-in voting, of course. While most <a href="https://patch.com/us/across-america/vote-mail-2020-5-things-know" target="_blank">Americans support</a> giving voters the option to vote by mail, enthusiasm is stronger among Democrats, who have also been less likely than Republicans to vote in person during this year's primaries. </p><p>After Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate mailed absentee ballot request forms to all registered voters ahead of the June legislative and congressional primaries, his fellow Republicans in charge of the Legislature <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880917081/tom-ridge-ex-dhs-sec-laments-sad-trump-fears-about-voting-by-mail" target="_blank">stepped in</a> in to prevent a similar mailing for the general election. And in battleground Michigan, a group of Trump backers <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/2020/06/13/trump-supporters-burn-michigan-absentee-ballot-applications/111958524/" target="_blank">staged a letter-burning</a> to protest the state sending all 7.7 million registered voters an application to vote absentee in November</p><p>Partisan splits in voter behavior may help fuel conspiracy theories in a close election, prominent election law scholar Richard Hasen has warned. After Pennsylvania's primary a month ago featured more Democrats voting by mail, and more Republicans voting in person, Hasen noted on his <a href="https://electionlawblog.org/?p=112359" target="_blank">ElectionLawBlog</a>: "If this pattern holds for November and nationwide, it means that Trump could be leading in places on election night only to have the outcome change as absentee ballots are counted in coming days."</p><p>Nevertheless, voter enthusiasm for voting by mail is unlikely to disappear after the pandemic. </p><p>The recent attacks on mail-in voting "are very problematic and destructive with regard to voter confidence," acknowledges Amber McReynolds, CEO of the <a data-linked-post="2640174112" href="https://thefulcrum.us/vote-at-home" target="_blank">National Vote at Home Institute</a>. "Election administration must be free from partisan politics." </p><p>But she adds that voters from both parties have made their preferences clear: "I do think that this has fundamentally shifted the way that Americans are going to vote going forward." Indeed, Trump's own actions may speak louder than his words — he himself voted by mail in the recent primary.</p><p><em>Carney is a contributing writer.</em></p>
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The suit echoes the president's unfounded claims that mail-in voting makes life easy for 'fraudsters.'
Trump campaign sues Pennsylvania over easier absentee voting
Jun 30 2020
President Trump is taking his crusade against voting by mail to a new level: His campaign has gone to court for the first time to combat liberalized absentee ballot rules — in Pennsylvania, a state central to his prospects for re-election.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in Pittsburgh, seeks to make the sixth most populous state abandon for November several of the ways it collected and counted mail-in ballots in the primary, alleging the procedures were both unconstitutional and against state law.
Although the Republican Party sued last month in an unsuccessful effort to limit the delivery of mail ballots to everyone in California, and is vowing to spend $20 million or more defending restrictive voting laws that Democrats are challenging in 18 states, Pennsylvania is the first place where the president's campaign has gone on litigious offense.
<p>The "hazardous, hurried and illegal" vote-by-mail system the state instituted for this month's primaries, <a href="https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/complaint_trump-campaign-v-boockvar.pdf" target="_blank">the lawsuit</a> argues, gives "fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes and sow chaos."<br/></p><p>The language emulates a barrage of tweets and public comments the president has made in recent weeks, but neither Trump nor his campaign's lawyers have offered any supporting evidence for the claim. His unfounded accusations have made the debate over easing the use of mail ballot rules during the coronavirus highly partisan, even though research shows the practice gives neither side an advantage.</p><p>The lawsuit argues that when officials in about 20 counties decided to provide drop boxes for absentee ballots, they were improperly asserting power belonging to the Legislature and violating the state and federal constitutions. State law says mail ballots must be returned directly to county elections offices. The drop boxes were installed because lawsuits have been unsuccessful in striking down a state law that says ballots must be received by the time the polls close — not just postmarked by then, as in a growing number of states.</p><p>The suit also alleges some counties violated state law by counting some mail ballots that did not arrive inside a secrecy envelope or had inappropriate writing on them. </p><p>The suit wants the drop boxes abandoned and the envelope rules enforced — and to make the state permit poll watchers to monitor vote counting (including of mailed ballots) outside the counties where they live.</p><p>The other plaintiffs are the Republican National Committee, four of the state's GOP members of Congress and a pair of Republicans who want to be poll watchers in November. </p><p>The defendants are Kathy Boockvar, the Democratic secretary of state, and all 67 counties' boards of elections.</p><p>Pennsylvania's June 2 primary was chaotic, with local media <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/pa-mail-ballots-deadline-2020-primary-election-20200610.html" target="_blank">reporting</a> tens of thousands of mail ballots arrived at election offices the week after the primary. Also, thousands more who applied to vote by mail showed up at polls to use provisional ballots because their mail-in ballots did not arrive in time. This prompted Democrtatic Gov. Tom Wolf to issue an <a href="https://www.governor.pa.gov/newsroom/gov-wolf-signs-executive-order-extending-mail-ballot-deadline-in-six-counties-to-june-9/" target="_blank">executive order</a> extending by a week the deadline for receiving and counting ballots in a handful of urban and suburban counties. </p><p>The head of the state Democratic Party called the suit an effort to suppress votes as a campaign tactic, noting her party far outpaced the GOP in getting voters to apply for mail-in primary ballots. </p><p>This is the first year Pennsylvanians may vote absentee without providing a specific excuse, part of an extensive rewrite of election law <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/deal-would-ease-voting-next-year-but-not-all-the-way-in-a-big-bellwether-state" target="_self">enacted with bipartisan support</a> in Harrisburg last fall. The result was that more than 1.8 million voters asked for a remote ballot and six out of every seven of those people returned them in time. The numbers suggest the share of votes cast by mail statewide in November may go up by an order of magnitude from 2016, when it was just 5 percent.</p><p>Trump carried the state's 20 electoral votes last time by 44,000 votes, or less than 1 percent of the votes cast. Recent statewide polling suggests he's in trouble now in the state, which the Democratic nominee won the six previous times.</p><p>The president has continuously attacked efforts to expand voting by mail, raising unfounded claims of voter fraud. Some argue the attacks could <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/trump-vote" target="_self">benefit</a> his campaign by potentially prompting Americans to decline to vote because they believe the system is corrupt. </p><p>The Pennsylvania suit is the latest in a multimillion-dollar partisan legal battle over voting rules. Recent decisions in Texas, Arizona and Iowa were <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting/voting-rights-lawsuits-2646290991" target="_self">a loss for voting rights advocates</a>, while decisions in Virginia and Nevada made <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting/absentee-ballot-virginia" target="_self">mail-in voting easier</a>. The GOP lawsuit in California, which argued Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom overstepped his bounds with his mail-in voting plans, was essentially nullified when the Legislature wrote a law doing just what he wanted.</p>
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Caroline Hunter's departure leaves the campaign finance regulator without a quorum until her would-be successor, Allen Dickerson, is confirmed.
FEC will be in limbo again after just 29 days of minimal life
Jun 26 2020
UPDATES with President Trump's nominee for the new vacancy.
The Federal Election Commission will be totally toothless once again.
Commissioner Caroline Hunter announced Friday that she's resigning at the end of next week, leaving the panel with just three members and therefore no quorum.
Her departure will come just 29 days after the arrival of fellow Republican Trey Trainor, a Texas campaign finance attorney. His party-line confirmation by the Senate in May restored a quorum to the commission for the first time in more than nine months — the longest period in the 45-year history of the agency charged with regulating donations to and spending by campaigns.
<p>The resignation took her fellow commissioners by surprise, but not the White House. Hours later, President Trump said he was nominating Allen Dickerson, who's now legal director at the Institute for Free Speech, a conservative nonprofit devoted to campaign finance deregulation.</p><p>In her <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000172-f13e-d49c-a57a-ffffb1430000" target="_blank">resignation letter</a>, Hunter said it was time for the agency to benefit from "new faces and fresh perspectives." But she urged Trump to choose a successor committed, as she has been, to protecting the First Amendment right of contributors to make unlimited and unregulated donations.</p><p>That is precisely what Dickerson's career has been about. And, in the decade since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision expanded its money-is-free-speech rationale — allowing businesses and unions as well as individuals to give as much as they like — Hunter often opposed efforts at the agency to set structure and boundaries around the flow of campaign cash.</p><p>It was not immediately clear how quickly Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, an ardent campaign finance deregulator, would arrange for Senate confirmation — or how hard the Democrats would work to delay if not prevent it.</p><p>The Senate's schedule is limited between now and the election, and Democrats will surely oppose any nominee who is not paired with someone they approve of.</p><p>Presidents have traditionally forwarded nominees for the commission in bipartisan pairs, but Trump has now put forward two Republicans in a row. Democratic senators have pushed for the president to also nominate FEC attorney Shana Broussard, who would be the commission's first Black member.</p><p>In the meantime, a return to limbo means the commission cannot address more than 300 cases pending on its enforcement docket — or any new ones brought against presidential or congressional candidates or the organizations hoping to steer money in their direction during the next four months.</p><p>Although the panel is largely deadlocked even when there is a quorum, because no party can hold more than half the seats and four votes are required for action, the result for the time being is a nearly totally hands off regulatory approach to the flow of several billions of dollars in political money.</p><p>The FEC will not even be able to conduct routine audits of federal candidate fundraising and spending, work that usually proceeds even when the commissioners are in partisan paralysis.</p><p>Last week the commission held its first meeting since August, but nothing controversial was on the agenda and no substantive decisions were made. No meetings can be held unless there's a quorum.</p><p>Hunter had been on the commission since 2008 and her term had expired six years ago, but the law had allowed her to stay on.</p><p>In her letter, Hunter also called out — although not by name — her Democratic panel colleague Ellen Weintraub, with whom she often butted heads.</p><p>"One commissioner — who has served for more than a decade past the expiration of her term — routinely mischaracterizes disagreements among commissioners about the law as 'dysfunction,' rather than a natural consequence of the FEC's unique structure, misrepresents the jurisdiction of the agency and deliberately enables outside groups to usurp the Commission's role in litigation and chill protected speech," she wrote. "The American people deserve better."</p><p>In response to the resignation, Weintraub said, "It's keenly disappointing for the FEC to lose its quorum in just a blink of an eye after we regained it. But of course I wish Caroline well in this and all her future endeavors."</p><p>Good-government groups had largely opposed Trainor's confirmation because of his deregulatory approach, but they were also critical of the long period of inertia at the agency.</p><p>"It is deeply disheartening and concerning that the FEC will again be missing in action," said Meredith McGehee of the democracy reform advocacy group Issue One. (It operates but is journalistically independent of The Fulcrum.) "The American people need a watchdog devoted to enforcing the anti-corruption laws on the books and ensuring transparency of the billions of dollars being spent to influence their votes."</p><p>Hunter is joining the legal team of Stand Together, a criminal justice reform nonprofit founded by the long-prominent conservative political financier Charles Koch.</p><p>Before joining the FEC she was a member of the Election Assistance Commission after working as a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House and for the Republican National Committee.</p>
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President Trump at Saturday's poorly attended campaign kickoff rally in Tulsa, Okla.
Trump’s latest baseless claim about mail voting sows doubts that could help him
Jun 23 2020
Voting rights groups, good-governance advocates, independent fact checkers and Democratic operatives are working to repel President Trump's latest salvo against voting by mail: His unsubstantiated assertion that foreign governments plan to flood the country with bogus ballots to rig the results and create "the scandal of our times."
The bogus claim intensifies the president's campaign in recent months to sow doubt about the integrity of the November election — mimicking the sort of disinformation campaigns Russia mounted in 2016 and several foreign adversaries are working on now.
And his efforts to undermine the electorate's confidence in the system, under upheaval as states scramble to accommodate a voting-by-mail surge because of the coronavirus, ignores years of work by states to successfully safeguard against fraud, which now includes tracking systems to connect each ballot with a singular voter.
<p>But Trump's unfounded warnings could benefit him two ways. </p><p>They could prompt millions to buy the notion the system is corrupt and then decide not to vote this fall, when the president says he knows high turnout will hurt his re-election prospects.</p><p>At the same time, they could set the stage for the president challenging the results, claiming a count that shows him losing thanks to a flood of absentee votes is surely the consequence of a stolen contest.</p><p>The president's freshest and most dramatic attacks on voting-by-mail, in an all-capitalized tweet Monday, came just before an extensive Associated Press report about Vice President Pence and many senior administration and campaign officials routinely casting absentee ballots.</p><p>One such official, Attorney General Bill Barr, was the first to speculate without evidence about a flood of fake ballots from abroad. "Right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots," he told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday. "Be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot." </p><p>The president on Monday retweeted a news report on that and then added his own tweet: "RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"</p><p>The campaign of Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who has said several times he suspects Trump will seek to delay the election or discredit the results, called Trump's tweets "a desperate attempt to rewrite reality to revive this president's faltering re-election campaign."</p><p>And the Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee, in one of its reports issued last year on Russian interference in the 2016 election, concluded that "sitting officials and candidates should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question." </p><p>Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington conduct elections almost entirely by mail — with virtually all the printing of ballots and envelopes done domestically. Several other states have already taken steps to encourage more people to use mail-in ballots as a way of social distancing on Election Day — including two major battlegrounds, Michigan and Wisconsin, which are sending absentee ballot request forms to almost all voters.</p><p>A steady series of studies have found scant evidence of vote-by-mail fraud and no evidence of the system giving one party's candidates more of an advantage.</p><p>Still, Trump said in a Politico interview published Friday that the "biggest risk" to his re-election is the growing use of mail-in ballots, and suggested his chances may rest on the success of the GOP's efforts to combat a wave of Democratic and civil rights group lawsuits pushing to make absentee voting easier.</p><p>Depending on how that litigation turns out, the consensus expectation is between half and two-thirds of all presidential votes will be cast by mail this fall — either way, far more than the one-in-four share in recent contests. Processing the tidal wave of paper will take days, especially in places not long-prepared for so much remote voting, leaving the results of close races a mystery but providing time for those worried about losing to amplify allegations of foul play.</p><p>Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary this year, apparently after listing the White House as his permanent address — which would make him a D.C. resident ineligible for an absentee ballot in the swing state he now calls home.</p><p>Similarly, the AP said Pence uses the governor's residence in Indianapolis, where he last lived three years ago and has no business returning to again, as his address for claiming Indiana absentee ballots ever since — including this month's GOP primary. </p><p>Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has taken advantage of her home state's laws to register to receive an absentee ballot proactively for every election in Michigan, one of the states where Trump is fighting easements on vote-by-mail. </p><p>And, the news service reported, re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale used a liberal interpretation of strict excuse requirements in order to vote absentee in Texas in 2018, while senior Trump campaign officials Michael Glassner and Bill Stepien have repeatedly voted by mail in New Jersey. Campaign advisor Nick Ayers, a former Pence chief of staff, has voted by mail in Georgia since 2014.</p><p>Other news outlets have reported White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany's long history of voting by mail and Barr's use of mail ballots in Virginia last year and in 2012.</p><p>The president is "trafficking in debunked conspiracy theories to undermine the election and keep Americans from casting their ballots," said Ryan Thomas of Stand Up America, a progressive group focused on winning federal funds to help states with mail-in voting this year. While "Trump and his aides clearly have no shame lying to the public about a practice they themselves use, Americans should be disgusted by their reckless attempts to suppress the vote amid an ongoing national crisis."</p>
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