End to vote by mail would hurt GOP more than help it [View all]

By Mary Ellen Klas / Bloomberg Opinion

If President Donald Trump were to issue an executive order to abolish mail-in voting, as he announced he would on social media on Monday, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. It would also be baffling; because eliminating vote-by-mail would probably hurt Republicans more than it would help them in next year’s midterm elections.

Trump has been thrashing about for months looking for ways to manipulate the midterms. He is so afraid that Republicans could lose Congress that he persuaded Texas Republicans to conduct a mid-decade redistricting to carve out five additional GOP congressional districts. He ordered the Department of Justice to create a federal database of information on voters, presumably to hunt for illegal voting and serve as a precursor to federal control of state elections. And now he’s attacking the mail-in ballot, which Trump has long claimed, without evidence, cost him the 2020 presidential election.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote in an error-filled post on Truth Social. Not according to Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which says that election rules “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” What’s more, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that statewide vote-by-mail systems are constitutional, upholding a 1998 ballot initiative that adopted the practice in Oregon.

Trump’s lengthy post also claimed that “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-end-to-vote-by-mail-would-hurt-gop-more-than-help-it/