Can Voting In Person Prevent Trump From Stealing The Election?
Source: Vanity Fair, Eric Lutz
Photo: Joe Biden greets supporters at a campaign stop in Minnesota September 18. (DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES)
Democrats are encouraging in-person voting as Trump steps up his baseless attacks on mail-in ballots—and given the threat of post-election legal challenges.
As Donald Trump makes clear his intention to remain in power, democracy be damned, his opponents are facing a difficult question: How can we ensure that if the American people tell him to go away, he’ll actually go? There’s no easy answer, considering the president’s multipronged effort to undermine the integrity of the fast-approaching election and the constitutional wilderness the nation may find itself in between November 3 and January 20. But the conventional wisdom—for now, anyway—seems to hold that the most straightforward way to bounce this would-be autocrat back to the gaudy country club from which he came is to deliver a massive, indisputable victory to Joe Biden and the Democrats, giving them a clear mandate only the truest of Trump’s true believers could deny.
But this kind of Biden blowout may not be realistic—despite the titanic scale of Trump’s failures and corruptions and outrages—given the tight races in several key battleground states. Further complicating the path toward that coveted rout, of course, is the president’s scorched earth campaign against the mail-in voting that’s expected to surge, particularly among Democrats, during this pandemic election. He and Louis DeJoy, the Republican donor he installed as postmaster general, are hamstringing the nation’s mail system in what Trump has more or less acknowledged as an effort to curb voting by mail. “It’s very simple,” Trump said last month, as the White House and Capitol Hill Republicans held up a coronavirus relief package over the postal service funding Democrats requested. “How are they going to do [mail-in voting] if they don’t have the money to do it?” Meanwhile, he’s relentlessly pushed the lie that mail-in voting is different than the absentee voting he and members of his family and administration routinely do—and that the former will lead to widespread fraud.
Seeking to ensure their votes get counted, and to minimize the inevitable post-election litigation Trump will bring, Democratic leaders and organizers are now more directly appealing to their voters to cast ballots in person. “We’re shifting away from making plans to vote by mail to voting early in person,” Quentin James, founder of the Collective PAC, told Axios Thursday.
In the early days of the COVID crisis, when less was known about how the virus was spread and the precautions that could be taken to protect against it, Democrats encouraged absentee voting as a safer alternative to going to the polls in person. Mail-in ballots are still certain to surge this year, meaning a winner is highly unlikely to be determined on election night. But the efficacy of masks as a protection against coronavirus infection, and Trump’s all-out assault on vote-by-mail, has led to a shift. “We’ve got to vote early,” former first lady Michelle Obama said in her rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. “In person, if we can.”
Given Trump’s postal service shenanigans, which have already resulted in mail delays, casting absentee ballots early, dropping them off personally, or voting in person could help ensure votes get counted. It could also help protect against a “hanging chads” redux, this time centered on the “naked ballots”—ballots mailed in without secrecy envelopes—that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled won’t be counted. Also on the mind of Democrats? A longer-than-normal tabulation process that could give Trump ample opportunity to prematurely declare himself the winner, especially in a “red mirage” scenario in which in-person voting appears to give him a lead, and seek to hold on to that bogus victory through litigation.
More early and in-person voting could reduce those threats, but likely won’t eliminate them entirely. Trump has made plain that the only election results he will accept are those that have him coming out on top. And while he’s latched onto vote-by-mail as the basis for his deranged fraud claims, he’s proven he has no qualms about accusing his opponents of fraud even without such an expedient vehicle for his charges. This is a man who still refuses to accept the results of the 2016 election he won, baselessly insisting that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton if it weren’t for the three million illegal votes that were cast—just a bit more, coincidentally, than the margin of his opponent’s lead. Democrats in the weeks ahead need to work to push Biden to victory. Even if they succeed, though, the fight won’t end there.