When it comes to Donald Trump’s latest attack on mail-in voting, the president, as usual, gets his facts and interpretation of the law wrong.
He claimed that the U.S. is one of the only, if not the only, country in the world that still uses mail-in voting. Not true by a long shot. Dozens of countries use some form of mail-in voting, including numerous democratic U.S. allies.
He claimed that he had the authority, with a stroke of a pen, to do away with mail-in voting. Again, nowhere close to the truth. The president may sign an executive order to attempt this, but it will be thrown out by the courts as blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear: The states individually, through their legislative bodies, set the rules for elections held within their borders, and only Congress has the authority to pre-empt that state power.
Setting those falsehoods aside, though, the president does have a point. The nation would be better served if there were less mail-in voting. It would reduce fraud and increase the faith that the public has in election results.
The research says that election fraud represents, on average, only a tiny percentage of the total vote. Where fraud does occur, though, it most often involves mail-in ballots because they are the easiest with which to tamper.
A bigger concern, though, may be that mail-in ballots slow down the counting of election results, dragging the outcomes out for days and sometimes weeks. When that happens, conspiracy theorists have a field day and distrust builds. Washington Post columnist Jason Willick, in the wake of Trump’s comments, reported on several studies that found people are less likely to think a candidate’s election was legitimate if the winner overtook the loser at the end of the count, such as after mail-in ballots were added.
That’s precisely what happened in the close election between Trump and Joe Biden in 2020. One of the key battleground states, Georgia, was narrowly in Trump’s column until late returns, including mail-in ballots, flipped that state to Biden. Even though there was no evidence that significant fraud occurred in Georgia or in any of the other states Trump narrowly lost, he was able to convince many in his own party to swallow the lie that the election had been stolen from him. His pre-election attacks on the integrity of mail-in ballots had primed them to believe that fraud occurred, even though the evidence later provided by the Trump camp was largely fabricated.
With 36 states, including plenty of Republican-governed ones, allowing mail-in voting for any reason, it is improbable that many of these states will roll this convenience back. Nor should they for those categories of voters — such as the military and other Americans living overseas, students attending college out of state, and the disabled — for whom mail-in ballots are the only reasonable or practical way for them to participate in elections.
For most of the able-bodied living in the United States, though, there is an alternative to mail-in ballots that would accomplish the same objectives of greater convenience and participation, while reducing the opportunity for fraud and increasing trust in the outcome. It’s called universal, in-person early voting.
Unfortunately, Mississippi is one of just three states that stubbornly refuse to allow any voters, regardless of reason, to go to the courthouse or other designated polling place to cast their ballots ahead of time. For the past two years, a Republican chairman in the state Senate has pushed unsuccessfully for a bill to create this option. It has died in part because of Gov. Tate Reeves’ vocal and irrational opposition.
Concerns about fraud and slow election returns are not enough to throw out mail-in voting. They are enough, though, to try to make it less necessary in Mississippi.
Universal, in-person early voting would accomplish that objective.
