Republicans In Swing States Were Fixing Vote-By-Mail Systems. Then Trump Tweeted.
The bill was supposed to be uncontroversial, and at first, it was. Early this year, Michigan advanced a bipartisan measure to let election officials take absentee ballots out of their mailing envelopes — but not to unseal the ballots or count them — the day before Election Day.
It was the kind of small, bureaucratic switch that could make the difference between timely results in this fall’s presidential election and chaos. And it was moving steadily, with Republican support, through Michigan’s GOP-led Senate.
Then, President Donald Trump made it clear that he preferred chaos.
“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” he tweeted in May. Since then, the bill has barely budged.
The loss of momentum in Michigan follows a pattern that voting rights advocates say they are seeing in key swing states: As Trump has worked furiously to undermine mail-in voting, rank-and-file Republicans, who were previously serious about adapting elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, have fallen in line to help him.
“We were making good progress. And then somebody started tweeting about mail-in voting and made it partisan,” said Amber McReynolds, the CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonpartisan group helping states prepare for Election Day. “I’m very concerned about the states that haven’t adjusted their laws to process the huge number of absentee ballots we’re expecting.”
Michigan is just one example. In Pennsylvania, Republicans have signaled that they won’t agree to speed up absentee ballot counting without also adding new voter restrictions. In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled state legislature has altogether ignored calls to prepare for a tidal wave of mail-in ballots.
All three are swing states that could determine the presidential race. And in all three states, laws bar officials from opening mail-in ballots before Election Day, making it virtually impossible to...
