A big and unexpected win for Democrats in Wisconsin this week has scrambled the debate over expanding vote-by-mail initiatives and extending them into the November election via jonward11
President Trump has said that expanding mail-in voting would help Democrats. But in Wisconsin, Republicans successfully fought efforts to expand it and yet their candidate in a key contest lost.
Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called the Wisconsin election “voter suppressions on steroids” in a conference call on Monday morning, hours before the election results came in. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, on that same call, decried “a Republican strategy to disenfranchise voters by preventing safe voting options based on the cynical calculation that Republicans might be more likely to vote in a pandemic.
To Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, however, the Milwaukee example still served as a warning sign for the fall elections, when the number of voters who participate increases exponentially and the potential for longer lines and long waits that discourage participation will be even greater. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, when asked about Elias’s comments, did not address the criticism but echoed what Trump has previously said: that voting by mail increases the chances of cheating. Trump has called mail-in voting “corrupt” and said that expanding it would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
In 2018, one of the most significant election fraud scandal in recent history took place: a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina financed an operation to illegally collect absentee ballots and filled them in on his behalf. The operative responsible was indicted and a new election was ordered.
There are 28 states that allow any voter to cast a ballot by mail, and five states — Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii — conduct their elections entirely by mail. The other 17 states require voters to have a valid reason to vote absentee. The mailer also instructed Republican voters to cast ballots by mail “to avoid lines and protect yourself from large crowds on Election Day.”
Perez of the Brennan Center wrote in her 2017 report that there are strong disincentives to the average individual to commit election fraud, apart from the obvious fact that any one vote is unlikely to affect the outcome of an election in which hundreds or thousands of citizens participate.
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