A confession: I voted by mail recently. And it didn’t feel dirty at all.
Like every voter, I had been warned against the practice by President Donald Trump.
“Mail-in ballots are very dangerous,” he said. “There’s tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality.”
“You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” he explained in April.
Busted! In our case, though, it was only three of us, not thousands. My wife, our daughter and I sat around a table, puzzled over the choices for Circuit Court and Board of Education, and shared a pen to sign the envelopes.
In our defense, we didn’t have much choice. In Maryland, where I live, our governor, a moderate Republican named Larry Hogan, decided that in-person voting would be too dangerous in a pandemic. Hogan closed most polling places and ordered counties to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter.
It seemed like a sensible precaution. But Trump objected so strongly that he threatened to block federal funding from Michigan and Nevada if they follow the same course. Both states have Democratic governors; oddly, he didn’t target any Republicans.
There’s no real evidence to support the president’s frequent charge that mail-in ballots leads to fraud.
The only large-scale vote fraud in recent years happened in North Carolina in 2018, but the problem wasn’t mail-in ballots. It was “ballot harvesting,” which allows campaign workers to collect ballots door-to-door. The culprit was a Republican.
Every so often, though, the president mentions a political objection too.
Mail-in voting “doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” he tweeted last month.
He said a Democratic proposal to require mail ballots nationwide would produce “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Many Republican political strategists think Trump is right on that count — that if voting is made easier, more Democrats will participate.
“There’s long been a fear that measures like automatic voter registration and vote by mail will help Democrats turn out more poor people and more black people,” a longtime Republican strategist told me. (He demanded anonymity to speak frankly.) “There’s a part of the GOP that is quite comfortable with voter suppression.”
Republican political consultant John Brabender was more diplomatic. He said he believes mail-in voting will help Democrats because their voters turn out less consistently, especially in cities.
