Concede one point to President Donald Trump on the question of voter fraud. If election cheating is going to occur during an election, it’s more likely to occur with mailed ballots than in-person ones.
Still, that’s more of a hypothetical problem than a real one. There have been isolated cases in which candidates or their supporters have tried to stuff the ballot box by casting absentee or other mail-in ballots in the names of voters who have moved or died. There is, however, no evidence that such cheating is significant enough to change the outcome of elections beyond the county or municipal level. Even at the local level, it’s improbable.
Thus, Trump’s proposed solution of using the U.S. Postal Service to police mail-in ballots would be worse than the alleged malady. This close to the November midterm elections, such a change would create mass confusion for the states, some of which have already begun to send out mail-in ballots in a format that might not conform to the Postal Service’s proposed guidelines.
Worse, the Postal Service would probably make a hash of it. A whistleblower within the Postal Service has already reported that the software the agency would use to verify whether a ballot is addressed to an eligible voter has not been thoroughly tested. Thus, it’s likely that legitimate ballots would go undelivered after being incorrectly flagged by the verification software.
An actual election is not the time for a trial run of buggy computer programming.
Even if the Postal Service had a stellar record of processing and delivering the mail, what Trump is asking of its operations would be difficult to achieve successfully. Given the Postal Service’s decades of financial losses, declining service and deteriorating public confidence, though, this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
There’s also the not-so-small matter of whether Trump’s plan to use the Postal Service to supposedly preempt voter fraud is constitutional. By law, only the states and Congress can set the rules for how America’s elections are conducted. Trump’s attorneys argue that the administration is not trying to regulate elections but rather the U.S. Mail. The U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has been generally friendly to the president, might swallow that spurious argument, but many of the American people won’t.
They fully grasp the president’s motivation. He is consumed with not losing the Republican majorities in Congress. He knows that if the Republicans lose one chamber to the Democrats, much less two, he will be unable to exercise the kind of power that a submissive GOP leadership on Capitol Hill has conferred on him. He also knows that a third impeachment becomes a distinct possibility if Democrats win the House of Representatives.
Desperate to stay in control in Washington, Trump persuaded several Republican-dominated states to draw new congressional voting boundaries a half-decade sooner than is traditionally done. His crusade to discourage and reduce mail-in voting is designed to further help GOP candidates in races that are expected to be close in November.
It is ultimately going to be up to the Supreme Court to curb these executive branch shenanigans, which are not bolstering the public’s faith in fair elections, but rather undermining them. The high court wasn’t up to the task on partisan gerrymandering.
Maybe it will rise to the occasion on mail-in voting and tell the president and the U.S. Postal Service to get back in their lanes.
