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Why Donald Trump Wants to Make Safe Elections a Partisan Issue

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Subscribers to The New Yorker’s new 2020 election newsletter, On the Trail, received this piece in their in-boxes. to receive future installments.In his daily, iterative search for things to demagogue about as the country reels from the , on Wednesday turned his attention to absentee ballots. “State of Nevada ‘thinks’ that they can send out illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario for the State and the U.S. They can’t! If they do, ‘I think’ I can hold up funds to the State. Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections,” the President on Wednesday. That wasn’t all. He had a similar threat to direct at a different state. “Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election,” he . “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”Trump has been raving since the crisis began—about , about he may or may not be taking, about —flitting from subject to subject as long as the subject is not his own of the situation. And yet, even in this context, these tweets stand out: the President of the United States has threatened to withhold federal funding from pandemic-stricken swing states over their efforts to make participating in the franchise safer. “If he did this privately, it would—rightly—be a massive scandal,” The Atlantic’s David A. Graham , imagining a scenario in which a Presidential plot to do exactly what’s spelled out in Trump’s tweets was leaked to the press rather than thumb-mashed straight out to the world via smartphone app. “Yet when he does it as part of a few dozen wildly varied tweets over the course of a morning, it’s written off as just another wacky missive from the wacky president.”No one knows whether it will be safe to vote in person in November. A few weeks ago, I wrote in this newsletter about that election experts are making to provide clear advice to election administrators. Expanded absentee voting is one recommendation they’re making—and an important one, but only one among many, and never as a complete substitute for in-person voting. Protecting our elections from a pandemic didn’t necessarily have to be a partisan matter. Last month, the senators Amy Klobuchar, Ron Wyden, and Chris Coons, though all Democrats, held a press call with a bipartisan group of state election officials, to show that this could be a cross-party conversation. In response to Trump’s tweets on Wednesday, Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, that a number of Republican-controlled states, including , have also taken steps to encourage absentee voting this year. These states have yet to draw Trump’s deranged ire. The Times’ data guru Nate Cohn raised a basic point: it’s not even clear that expanded absentee voting will hurt Trump or his party. “[I]t’s totally conceivable to me that higher turnout would help him in these Midwestern states, where the kind of lower turnout and less educated voters who sat out the midterms probably tilt-GOP,” Cohn .Even Republicans dead set on fighting Democrats over any change to voting procedure this year seem to agree with Cohn. In Wisconsin, one of the Midwestern states he was referring to, Republicans encouraged as many people as possible to avail themselves of absentee ballots for the elections last month, even as they opposed every other measure to make voting safer and easier that was offered by the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers. But Trump’s ravings about absentee ballots do grant one thing: cover. As my colleague Jelani Cobb has , “There is&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. an area in which the novel-coronavirus pandemic dovetails exceptionally well with part of Trump’s agenda and that of the Republican Party in some states: voter suppression.” Many Republicans may see the virtues of absentee ballots while also not wanting to relinquish the shaping of the electorate they’ve worked so hard in recent years to achieve, through voter-I.D. and other restrictive voting laws. Trump’s ranting about absentee ballots gives them cover, much as his grandstanding about birtherism years ago opened up space for them to question Obama’s legitimacy as President, even if they didn’t subscribe to the cracked conspiracy theory themselves. That it may well set the stage for Trump to question the results of November’s election, well, that’s just a problem for later., a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2008. He writes a regular column about New York City politics, people, and more. He previously served as The New Yorker’s deputy news editor.The best of The New Yorker, every day, in your in-box, plus occasional alerts when we publish major stories.

Subscribers to The New Yorker’s new 2020 election newsletter, On the Trail, received this piece in their in-boxes. to receive future installments.In his daily, iterative search for things to demagogue about as the country reels from the , on Wednesday turned his attention to absentee ballots. “State of Nevada ‘thinks’ that they can send out illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario for the State and the U.S. They can’t! If they do, ‘I think’ I can hold up funds to the State. Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections,” the President on Wednesday. That wasn’t all....

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Eric Lach

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Why Donald Trump Wants to Make Safe Elections a Partisan Issue

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