It's Not Right, But You Might Have to Vote in Person
[link:https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34124703/vote-in-person-trump-attacks-vote-by-mail/|
If you want to be sure your vote is counted, you're probably going to have to vote in person. This is not right or fair during a pandemic that the ruling regime has allowed to rage out of control across much of the nation, yielding the worst record on COVID-19 response among rich countries. It's not right that this will be necessary because that same regime is waging a systematic campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election. It's not fair that American citizens will have to risk their health and their lives to exercise their most fundamental democratic right when we could so easily have designed a system where people can vote safely and securely by mail, as states like Oregon have done for decades. But life in a budding authoritarian state is not fair.
The president has latched onto the Republican Party's years-long assault on voting rights and dramatically expanded it. Ever since it became clear that more Americans would vote by mail than usual, the president has relentlessly attacked the prospect. He first did so in rhetoric, baselessly claiming that there would be widespread fraud if people vote by mail in large numbers—again, some states have done so for years without incident—while Republicans simultaneously encourage people to vote by absentee ballot, as he and many of his advisers have in recent elections. There is no functional difference between vote-by-mail and absentee. At one point, he floated—"joked"—about delaying the election on the evidence-free basis that there would be fraud.
Then the focus shifted to using the power of the federal government to destroy vote-by-mail. He tapped a campaign donor, Louis DeJoy—who may have been quite active indeed on the Republican fundraising front—to vandalize the United States Postal Service. The agency's normal functions became collateral damage as deliveries and processing slowed down, but Trump said outright it was related to the election. The implication was clear: if you vote by mail, your ballot might arrive late. If it arrives late, it might not be counted. Even the prospect of this might discourage people from participating. And when proponents of vote-by-mail shifted focus to a perfectly viable alternative—allowing people to drop off their mail ballots in secure boxes—the Trump campaign sued to prevent their use in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. Again, the justification was a baseless claim about fraud.
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