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On Thursday, President Donald Trump tweeted, “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” Twitter
Later on Thursday, Trump “said he did not want to postpone the vote, but remained concerned that millions of mail-in ballots would cause problems.” Reuters
Both sides oppose delaying the election:
“Trump does not have the right or the authority to delay November’s election. Only the states and Congress have the power to delay the election process and only if an extreme circumstance demands it. But America has faced many such extreme circumstances in the past and has not once delayed a presidential election. And we will not do so now just because Trump dislikes mail-in voting.”
Kaylee McGhee, Washington Examiner
“We did not delay elections when the future of the nation was at stake during the Civil War and World War II. We did not delay the election in 1968 when urban riots were the norm, when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, and when the Democratic National Convention broke down amid an anti-war riot outside the event that Chicago police brutally suppressed with tear gas and billy clubs. There is no need to even suggest delaying today, when most Americans can move freely and with three months to go before Election Day.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
“In June 1812, President James Madison declared war on Great Britain, precipitating the War of 1812… With the nation divided and under attack, Madison might easily have considered postponing that year's election. Instead, he won a second term, kept the union together and negotiated an end to hostilities… Less than half a century later, Abraham Lincoln faced an even more grievous threat to the union…
“Then came the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed some 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans. It was one of the most disruptive disasters in modern history, forcing the closure of churches, schools, amusements and even federal courts -- but not voting booths… Our country has seen worse and always had the fortitude and democratic idealism to carry on. November 3 is the gold-stamped day. The race for the White House has begun.”
Douglas Brinkley, CNN
Other opinions below.
“For months, Donald Trump’s allies and even a few of his critics have blasted Democrats and a handful of media figures for their baseless theories that the president would cancel or delay the national election… And then Trump … just … tweeted it out…
“The best that could be said for this tweet is that Trump’s just spitballing, but even that’s an indictment of its own. No president should just be spitballing a suggestion like this, not in public and not even in private… What could possibly be gained from tweeting out this absurd idea, other than perhaps distracting from the bad GDP report everyone was more or less expecting anyway? It’s such a bad argument that it actually might set back the legitimate arguments to avoid mail-in balloting.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“Mail-in ballots are the ballots most vulnerable to being altered, stolen, or forged. Just look at the current investigation going on in Paterson, N.J., over a recent municipal election conducted entirely by mail. Four Paterson residents have already been charged with criminal election fraud, including a councilman and councilman-elect… Mail-in ballots also have a higher rejection rate than votes cast in person. In the Paterson case, election officials apparently rejected one in five ballots… New York, which has taken more than a month to count the ballots from its June 23 primary election, is also reporting a similar rejection rate…
“In the 2016 election, almost 130 million Americans voted. Does anyone really think the Postal Service will be able to suddenly handle 260 million pieces of additional mail — that is, the ballots being mailed out by election officials, and then mailed back by voters? Just from a practical standpoint, that is asking for chaos and mass disenfranchisement.”
Hans A. von Spakovsky, Fox News
“Rather than claim our nation is in such shambles that we can't even hold an election that's been on the books for literally centuries, Trump should be spending every iota of political capital he has to get the nation reopened safely and swiftly and force Republicans to get a second pandemic spending bill done… Everything from the speed of our economy to the extent of our long-term job losses will be determined by whether the economy grows by 8% from this quarter or 2%.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
“Trump offered no evidence to support his claim that voting by mail is an invitation to fraud. One reason for this is that there isn’t any. Of the 250 million votes cast by mail nationally over the past 20 years, about 0.00006% were found to be fraudulent. Nor does voting by mail favor one party over the other in terms of vote share or turnout. What the evidence does show is that unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud significantly reduce confidence in electoral integrity, especially when they cohere with a given voter’s politics.”
Editorial Board, Bloomberg
“Election officials from across the country affirm that multiple factors would prevent large-scale rigging of the kind he and Mr. Trump suggest. Ballots come with identifiers unique to each voter. Each jurisdiction uses different paper types, envelope widths and other ballot characteristics. Signatures on ballots are matched to preexisting government records. Election offices keep track of exactly how many ballots they send out, how many get returned and by whom.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
Nonetheless, “Officials should prepare for the possibility of hackers injecting corrupted data into the underlying systems by, say, changing the address on a voter registration file… To prevent such errors, officials should conduct periodic testing to identify vulnerabilities in election systems, update and patch all essential software, and monitor registration and ballot request activity to look for abnormal patterns. Another simple resiliency measure is to text or email voters each time a change to their record is made, similar to the protocol on many online commercial accounts.”
Lawrence Norden, Slate
“There are legitimate worries about the capacity of states and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to manage elections this fall. Many states are not used to seeing a large volume of mail-in votes and local election officials have been overwhelmed by the flood of absentee ballot requests and the ballots themselves… but neither Trump nor Republicans in Congress have done much to fix [the problems]. States need an estimated $4bn to adequately prepare for vote by mail, but Congress has allocated just $400m so far. The most recent Republican Covid-19 relief proposal in the Senate contained no additional funding to states to help them run elections.”
Sam Levine, The Guardian
