This post was originally published on this site
Republicans are playing catch-up with Democrats to boost the number of their voters requesting mail-in ballots in key states, an effort that is complicated by President Trump’s criticism of all-mail voting.
President Trump has said he opposes automatically mailing out ballots to registered voters, which he calls “universal mail-in voting,” and he says it will invite fraud and errors. However, he has said he supports a system where a voter must request a by-mail ballot in advance, which he calls “absentee voting.” Absentee and vote-by-mail are sometimes used interchangeably.
Even before the pandemic, more than 30 states allowed anyone to vote by mail without needing a specific reason, and several others, such as New York and Kentucky, will allow that for November in response to the coronavirus. Only a handful, including Texas, still restrict absentee voting to those who meet certain criteria, such as disability or being out of town on Election Day.
At least nine states and the District of Columbia plan to mail ballots to all registered voters this fall. Five—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah—have established mail-in voting programs, while the others are doing so in response to the pandemic.
Nearly a quarter of the votes cast in the 2016 general election nationwide were by-mail, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Fears of the coronavirus are expected to boost those numbers to unprecedented levels this year.
Four years ago, Trump won some politically important states with high levels of voting by mail. In Arizona, mail-in votes accounted for 75% of all ballots. In Florida and Michigan, they were about a quarter of the total votes, according to the Journal’s analysis of the states’ turnout data.
Trump won all three states in 2016 with less than 50% of all the votes cast, and they are again battlegrounds in the 2020 campaign.
Democrats during this week’s convention urged their voters to cast ballots early, whether by mail or in person, to avoid long lines or social-distancing issues at polling places on Election Day.
They also have expressed concerns about proposed changes to the U.S. Postal Service, which they worry would slow the delivery of mailed ballots. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy this week said he would suspend some but not all operational changes until after the election. DeJoy testified Friday on those matters before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The House is scheduled to vote Saturday on a bill that would prohibit operational changes to the Postal Service until well after the election and give the agency $25 billion in additional funding.
Trump, who has voted by mail in Florida before, appeared to acknowledge the strategic role of voting by mail in the state in an Aug. 4 tweet: “Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True.”
Even if a voter requests a vote-by-mail ballot he or she might not use it. In the 2016 general election, more Democrats than Republicans requested a vote-by-mail ballot in Florida. But more Republicans actually cast their vote-by-mail ballot, roughly 1.108 million, compared with some 1.049 million Democrats, according to state records.
