Voting by mail does not actually have a partisan
effect.
It’s neutral.
It doesn’t help Democrats; it doesn’t
help Republicans.
What it does do is boost turnout.
And so, there is this assumption that President
Trump — and some other Republicans make
this assumption, as well — that if more
people vote, they are more likely to lose.
I want to ask about the repeated attacks on
vote-by-mail by people, of course, other than
by President Trump, by Republicans claiming
to be attacking voter fraud.
In Georgia, the new secretary of state, Brad
Raffensperger, a Republican, has announced
an absentee ballot fraud task force to investigate
signature mismatches and other issues.
In your New York Times Magazine piece, you
quote Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action,
who says the task force is “a submission
to the Trump voter-suppression machine.”
Explain.
So, yes.
In Georgia, I think the concern of voting
rights advocates, like Lauren Groh-Wargo,
is that people will hear they’re going to
be investigated if they vote by mail, and
they’ll get nervous about it.
And that will intimidate them in a way that
will discourage voting.
I think it’s also important to connect this to a 
longtime voter suppression tactic among conservatives.
So, you go back to the '60s, you had poll
taxes, literacy tests,
to try to prevent African Americans from voting.
Then we have the Voting Rights Act.
It becomes illegal to do things like that.
But you start to see a push for voter identification
at the polls.
And the justification for voter ID laws was
we're preventing fraud.
So, it turns out there’s almost no fraud
at the polls.
If you think about it, it would be really
hard to turn an election by having people
show up and vote twice.
You’d need a lot of people to do that and
get away with it.
It just isn’t really a problem.
And so, that does not stop conservatives and
a lot of Republicans, however, from making
this charge over and over again.
We’re seeing it now with a complaint about
voting by mail, even though states like Secretary
Griswold’s, with a really good track record
and practically universal voting by mail,
have very low levels of fraud.
And you also see it with something called
purging, which is this idea of cleaning up
the voter rolls by cutting people off of them
if they haven’t voted for a while or if
their names don’t exactly match in other
databases.
And similarly, the rationale given for purging
the rolls is to prevent fraud.
But the reality of fraud is just much, much
smaller — really tiny — compared to the
amount of people who end up with barriers
to voting for these reasons.
Emily Bazelon, is the Trump campaign spending
its election money on efforts to limit voting by mail?
There is at least $10 [million], I think now
it’s up to $20 million, that the Republican
National Committee has set aside for lawsuits
relating to the election.
You know, this is perfectly normal.
The Democrats are spending money on lawsuits,
too.
But the Republicans are doing things like
challenging an all-vote-by-mail primary in
New Mexico, a conservative group challenging
a similar effort in Nevada.
And then we also are seeing the Republicans
just gear up for election monitoring, for
their efforts on the day of the election,
for the people who do vote at the polls, you
know, perhaps to interfere with their right
to vote.
That is something that has happened in the
past.
They’ve been blocked from doing what’s
called ballot security for many years because
of a consent decree they agreed to in the
1980s.
But that consent decree will be gone for the
first presidential election in 40 years.
And so that’s another potential for spending
this kind of money on.
The military has been doing mail-in voting
for what?
Two hundred years?
Well, yeah.
It started in the Civil War.
You’re right.
That’s where we get the idea of absentee
balloting from.
There was actually a struggle through World
War I and World War II over how much absentee
balloting soldiers would be able to do.
But yes, they have been doing it this way
for a long time.
