President Donald Trump on Thursday tried to draw a distinction between “mail-in voting” and “absentee voting,” but his own lawyers acknowledged in court documents the two are the same thing.
Trump suggested delaying the election on Thursday amid plummeting poll numbers and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 150,000 people and caused the largest GDP drop in U.S. history. Trump has no power to postpone the election, and the idea was roundly rejected by Republican lawmakers. At the same time, many members of the GOP have expressed similar concerns about mail-in voting as the president.
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump claimed without evidence.
Some states have long used all-mail elections. There have been more than 250 million ballots cast by mail in the last 20 years, and only 143 prosecutions related to mail ballot fraud, or a rate of about 0.00006%.
Trump later reiterated that he opposed “mail-in-voting” but “totally” supports “absentee voting,” even though they are the same thing. Trump and many of his aides have repeatedly voted by mail themselves.
Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for example, have claimed that they voted “absentee” in Florida. But there is no “absentee” voting in Florida. Instead, the state has a “no excuse” vote-by-mail system that allows anyone to cast a ballot by mail for any reason.
Trump’s own lawyers acknowledged that there is no difference between “mail-in voting” and “absentee voting” in a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s mail voting rules last month.
Attorneys for the Trump campaign noted that while some states have different wording regarding the terminology, “the terms ‘mail-in’ and ‘absentee’ are used interchangeably to discuss the use of the United States Postal Service to deliver ballots to and from electors” in a lawsuit available in full on the president’s website.
https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1289012270824128518?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1289012270824128518%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.salon.com%2F2020%2F07%2F31%2Ftrump-says-mail-voting-is-bad-but-absentee-voting-is-good-his-lawyers-admit-theyre-the-same-thing%2F
Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Democratic Party who frequently argues election cases in court, told MSNBC on Thursday that “there is no distinction” between the two terms.
“They are synonyms,” he said. “Some states tend to use the term ‘mail-in.’ Some states tend to use the term ‘absentee.’ Sometimes, within a state, the statutes will refer to both. But they are both the same. They are both processes by which people who don’t want to show up to the polls in person can receive in the mail a ballot . . . that they either mail back or deliver through some other mechanism to election officials. There is no difference.”
Trump’s complaints appear to be based on the premise that mail voters typically have to request and fill out a form in order to obtain a mail-in ballot, but some states are sending every eligible voter an application in anticipation of a surge in mail voting due to the pandemic.
The president falsely claimed on Thursday that states were sending out “hundreds of millions of universal mail-in ballots.”
Aside from the fact that there are not “hundreds of millions” of voters in the country, only California, which Trump lost by 31 points in 2016, plans to send absentee ballots to voters. Though Trump has falsely accused other states like Michigan of sending everyone a ballot, Michigan is one of a handful of states that is sending applications — not ballots — to eligible voters. There is not a single state that is sending ballots or applications to anyone who is not registered to vote.
Trump and Attorney General William Barr have also floated conspiracy theories that these ballots could possibly be tampered with or forged, but these baseless claims have been refuted by Republican state officials. There are numerous safeguards in place, including bar codes and signature verification.
Beverly Clarno, Oregon’s Republican secretary of state, told CBS News that the state’s system uses unique barcodes for each ballot it sends out. Kim Wyman, Washington’s Republican secretary of state, told The New York Times that “vote-by-mail has a lot of security measures.”
“At the end of the day, all voting systems are like banks,” she said. “You build a lot of things in to protect from fraud. You build in a lot of measures to detect it. But ultimately, if somebody wants to commit fraud, or if someone wants to rob a bank, they can. And then we have measures on the back end to prosecute that criminal activity. So you hope to deter it, and you hope it doesn’t happen. But if it does, you have ways to deal with it.”
Pressed on his false claims about mail voting on Thursday, Trump spun a new narrative arguing that he does not want election results to be delayed.
“I don’t want to see an election — you know, so many years, I’ve been watching elections. And they say the ‘projected winner’ or the ‘winner of the election’ — I don’t want to see that take place in a week after Nov. 3, or a month or frankly — with litigation and everything else that can happen — years,” Trump claimed. “Years. Or you never even know who won the election.”
Election experts rejected the idea that counting mailed-in ballots, which happens in every election, would delay the election for years.
“That’s not new. We’ve had absentee voting in this country for a long time,” Elias told MSNBC. “We regularly don’t have all the ballots counted on election night.”
“Any state should be able to count votes-by-mail and verify it within a month unless something derails the system,” Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, told The Hill.
“We should get ready for the fact that we may not know who won on Election Night,” added Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. “But there’s a process for counting and a process for fighting over the count. And the Constitution says that all of that is over — full stop — well before noon on Jan. 20.”
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to look at hard realities and communicate them to you. We hope that you, like us, can use this information to prepare for what’s to come.
And if you feel uncertain about what to do in the face of a second Trump administration, we invite you to be an indispensable part of Truthout’s preparations.
In addition to covering the widespread onslaught of draconian policy, we’re shoring up our resources for what might come next for progressive media: bad-faith lawsuits from far-right ghouls, legislation that seeks to strip us of our ability to receive tax-deductible donations, and further throttling of our reach on social media platforms owned by Trump’s sycophants.
We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
We urgently need your help to prepare. As you know, our December fundraiser is our most important of the year and will determine the scale of work we’ll be able to do in 2025. We’ve set two goals: to raise $120,000 in one-time donations and to add 1383 new monthly donors by midnight on December 31.
Today, we’re asking all of our readers to start a monthly donation or make a one-time donation – as a commitment to stand with us on day one of Trump’s presidency, and every day after that, as we produce journalism that combats authoritarianism, censorship, injustice, and misinformation. You’re an essential part of our future – please join the movement by making a tax-deductible donation today.
If you have the means to make a substantial gift, please dig deep during this critical time!
With gratitude and resolve,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy