Nothing illustrates the mixed-up politics of vote-by-mail better than the world’s most famous absentee voter declaring the practice corrupt. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters,” Donald Trump told reporters in early April, a few weeks after casting an absentee ballot in Florida’s primary. “They're fraudulent in many cases.”
With the timeline of the coronavirus pandemic still uncertain, it’s clear that the US needs a plan to allow people to vote in November without putting their lives at risk. The most obvious option is to let everyone cast their ballot by mail. But, as with so many things coronavirus-related, that idea has become polarized along partisan lines. A poll released this week by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 73 percent of Democrats in favor of allowing everyone to vote by mail, compared to just 46 percent of Republicans (and 59 percent of independents). In Washington, while congressional Democrats push to include funding to expand vote-by-mail in the federal coronavirus relief bills, some Republican officials, most notably Trump, decry the idea as a partisan power grab. “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump told the hosts of Fox & Friends in March, referring to the Democrats’ proposals.
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Trump was roundly ridiculed for suggesting that expanding ..
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