The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N A

Election


President Trump is stepping up
his attacks on the integrity of the
election system, sowing doubts
about the November vote at a time
when the pandemic has upended
normal balloting and as polls
show former Vice President Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. ahead by large
margins.
Having yet to find an effective
formula for undercutting Mr. Bi-
den or to lure him into the kinds of
culture war fights that the presi-
dent prefers, Mr. Trump is train-
ing more of his fire on the political
process in a way that appears in-
tended to give him the option of
raising doubts about the legitima-
cy of the outcome.
Promoting baseless questions
about election fraud is nothing
new for Mr. Trump. He has hop-
scotched from saying that Presi-
dent Barack Obama was elected
with the help of dead voters to
suggesting that undocumented
immigrants were voting en masse
to claiming that out-of-state vot-
ers were bused into New Hamp-
shire in 2016.
But in recent days, Mr. Trump
has focused intensive new attacks
on voting by mail, as states grap-
ple with the challenge of conduct-
ing elections in the middle of surg-
ing coronavirus cases in many
parts of the country.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump de-
clared, without offering any evi-
dence, that the 2020 election “will
be, in my opinion, the most cor-
rupt election in the history of our
country, and we cannot let this
happen.”
Mail-in ballots, he said, refer-
ring to conspiracy theories, could
be stolen from carriers, counter-
feited or forged by either forces in-
side the United States or by “for-
eign powers who don’t want to see
Trump win.”
“There is tremendous evidence
of fraud whenever you have mail-
in ballots,” Mr. Trump claimed
during an appearance in Arizona,
a statement that has no basis in
the experience of the states that
give voters the option of voting by
mail.
Mr. Trump has made five dozen
false claims about mail balloting
since April, as officials in various
states began contemplating the
need for expanded use of the op-
tion amid the pandemic.
About a third of the president’s
falsehoods were general warn-
ings about widespread fraud in
mail-in voting. Another 11 were
specific claims about held-up mail
carriers, stolen and forged ballots
and dead people voting.
Figures released Wednesday
from a New York Times/Siena
College survey of battleground-
state voters showed that 61 per-
cent strongly or somewhat sup-
port allowing all voters to use
mail-in ballots if necessary, while
37 percent strongly or somewhat
oppose it.
But the poll also suggested that
Mr. Trump’s message was getting
through to his base: 88 percent of


Biden supporters in six battle-
ground states strongly or some-
what support mail-in voting, while
72 percent of Mr. Trump’s support-
ers strongly or somewhat oppose
it.
Justin Clark, the senior counsel
to the Trump campaign, defended
the president’s words. He said
that Mr. Trump was voicing legiti-
mate concerns about how many
people would have their hands on
ballots with broad mail-in voting,
adding, “This is all in the context
of a broad democratic push to

greatly expand vote by mail four
months before the general elec-
tion.”
The president’s supporters
have already shown that they are
taking his assertions to heart. In
Michigan, voters began to burn
their absentee ballot applications
that were sent to them by the state
in an act of protest. In Alabama
and Kansas, state legislatures
have started to pull back from ex-
panded vote-by-mail initiatives.
The president’s attacks on vot-
ing by mail stirred widespread
concern from current and former
election officials and election ex-
perts.
“His comments are exceedingly
damaging to democracy, to Amer-
ica’s standing in the world, to vot-

ers’ confidence in our elections,”
said Wendy R. Weiser, the director
of the Democracy Program at the
Brennan Center for Justice, a non-
partisan think tank. “If you are ril-
ing up supporters into a state of
anger over the legitimacy of the
election, they might actually take
steps to try to suppress votes and
to undermine the actual legiti-
mate running of the election.”
The unfounded conspiracy the-
ories, some officials said, were no
different from the kind of toxic
confusion that Russia and other
nations have sought to inject into
American politics.
“It is misinformation and disin-
formation, and it’s no different
than foreign adversaries and cy-
berhackers spewing info about an
election process,” said Amber
McReynolds, a former election of-
ficial from Colorado and the cur-
rent chief executive of the Na-
tional Vote at Home Institute,
which promotes voting by mail.
Richard L. Hasen, an election
law expert and a professor at the
University of California, Irvine,
said that unlike the president’s
false claims about in-person vot-
ing, there have been sporadic
problems with mail-in voting, giv-
ing Mr. Trump a kernel of truth on
which to build an indictment of the
entire system.
“The shift has been to mail-in
balloting,” Mr. Hasen said of Mr.
Trump’s comments, “and this is
especially dangerous now be-
cause everything about our elec-
tions is being upended by the vi-
rus.”
The president has directly ac-
cused Democrats five times of

“rigging” the election through
mail-in voting, and has claimed
four times that Republicans are at
a disadvantage when mail-in bal-
lots are used or are not sent mail-
in ballots at all.
Election officials on both sides
of the aisle lamented the presi-
dent’s attacks are making their
jobs harder.
Kim Wyman, the Republican
secretary of state of Washington
State, which conducts its elections
almost entirely by mail, pointed to
the difficulty of fielding enough
workers to count ballots safely
during the pandemic or work at
the state’s few in-person voting
sites.
In California, Alex Padilla, the
Democratic secretary of state,
said that the president was under-
mining confidence in the election
for his own political benefit.
“What he’s trying to do is abso-
lutely clear: He is not just seeking
to undermine the confidence in
the election, but confidence in the

November election results that he
may not like,” Mr. Padilla said.
Mr. Hasen said that Mr. Trump’s
denigration of by-mail voting puts
into focus scenarios that Demo-
crats are increasingly worried
about, like Mr. Trump declaring
victory in specific states based on
Election Day tallies, when absen-
tee ballot totals could shift the re-
sults days later.
Already, 34 states and Washing-
ton, D.C., offer no-excuse absen-
tee ballots — including battle-
ground states like Wisconsin,
Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania
and Arizona — so even without ex-
tra measures introduced in re-
sponse to the pandemic, voters
are likely to utilize mail-in ballots
at a much greater rate than previ-
ously.
Frank LaRose, the Republican
secretary of state of Ohio, who
took issue with Mr. Biden when he
said that he feared Mr. Trump was
trying to “steal” the election,
called for an end to such attacks.

“President Trump and Vice
President Biden have both ques-
tioned the integrity of our elec-
tions recently without citing evi-
dence, and they both need to stop
it,” Mr. LaRose said in a state-
ment.
Voter fraud, in all forms, is ex-
tremely rare, according to numer-
ous independent studies and gov-
ernment reviews. While mail-in
voting is less secure than voting in
person, fraud remains statis-
tically tiny.
A database of proven election
fraud cases maintained by the
Heritage Foundation, a conserva-
tive think tank, includes 206 cases
that involved “fraudulent use of
absentee ballots” from 1991 to this
year. The Times was unable to find
any news reports or instances of
mail carriers being held up over
mail-in ballots. It would be a fed-
eral crime to do so.
California has been a particular
focus of Mr. Trump’s ire, featuring
in six false attacks, but the battle-
ground states of Michigan and Ne-
vada have earned nods, as well.
He has inaccurately claimed
that “anybody in California that’s
breathing gets a ballot,” including
“people that aren’t citizens, ille-
gals.” State officials will mail bal-
lots to active registered voters
only.
He wrongly claimed that Neva-
da and Michigan had “illegally”
sent absentee ballots to voters,
and threatened to withhold fed-
eral funding should they not re-
scind the policy, though he did not
have the authority to do so.
More recently, Mr. Trump has
seized upon the idea that foreign
countries could simply print bal-
lots on their own, repeating the
claim four times this week without
providing evidence.
Election officials and experts
have widely rejected this idea as
nearly impossible, noting that bal-
lots are printed on very specific
stock and often have specific
tracking systems like bar codes.
“It’s so much more difficult than
a cyberattack. You’d not only have
to attack the printer, you’d have to
get information from the jurisdic-
tion and get voter registration in-
formation,” said Lawrence Nor-
den of the Brennan Center. “You’d
have to have some way of mailing
the ballots from an address and
get the signature of the voter. It
would be an exceptionally difficult
attack.”

Unable to Undercut Biden, Trump Trains Fire on Trust in Voting by Mail


This article is by Maggie Ha-
berman, Nick Corasanitiand Linda
Qiu.


President Trump said on Tuesday, without evidence, that this would be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.”

ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dozens of false claims


about mail-in ballots


as a pandemic rages.


WASHINGTON — The Demo-
cratic National Convention will
move out of Milwaukee’s profes-
sional basketball arena, and state
delegations are being urged not to
travel to the city because of con-
cerns about the coronavirus pan-
demic, party officials said
Wednesday.
Former Vice President Joseph
R. Biden Jr. still intends to travel
to Milwaukee to accept his party’s
presidential nomination, his cam-
paign manager said, but neither
his campaign nor the Democratic
National Committee have made
firm commitments that Mr. Biden
will attend.
The Democratic convention will
be “anchored” in Milwaukee, but
the four-night mid-August event
will “include both live broadcasts
and curated content from Milwau-
kee and other satellite cities, loca-
tions and landmarks across the
country,” according to a news re-
lease.
The announcement that the
convention will move five blocks
from the 17,000-seat Fiserv Forum
to the Wisconsin Center, Milwau-
kee’s convention center, stands in
contrast to the plans being made
by Republicans, who at the behest
of President Trump moved the
venue for his nomination accept-
ance speech from Charlotte, N.C.,
to Jacksonville, Fla., where local
officials have required fewer
safety precautions, even as cases
of the virus continue to surge in
Florida.
The news came as the United
States reported the highest single-
day total of new coronavirus cases
since late April.
It remains unclear how many
delegates will converge on Mil-
waukee for the convention, or
even who will be allowed inside
the convention hall. It is not yet
decided what sort of access jour-
nalists will have to the proceed-
ings. Nor is it clear how much
space convention planners will


need for a production footprint or
what social distancing require-
ments will be in place when the
convention begins on Aug. 17.
And while Mr. Biden’s cam-
paign insists he is planning to at-
tend, they have yet to make a firm
commitment.
“Vice President Biden intends
to proudly accept his party’s

nomination in Milwaukee,” said
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s
campaign manager. “The city of
Milwaukee has been an incredible
partner and we are committed to
highlighting Wisconsin as a key
battleground state at our conven-
tion this August.”
The coronavirus pandemic has
forced Democrats to drastically
roll back plans for what would

have been an enormous celebra-
tion of Mr. Biden and the party’s
efforts to oust Mr. Trump. A sur-
vey of D.N.C. members last month
found the vast majority of them
did not want to attend an in-per-
son convention, citing health risks
from the pandemic.
All of the convention’s official
business — setting its rules,
adopting a platform and formally
nominating Mr. Biden and his run-
ning mate — will be conducted re-
motely, party officials said.
Convention organizers have
added two epidemiologists, W. Ian
Lipkin of Columbia University
and Larry Brilliant, who is known
for his work eradicating smallpox,
to advise officials on public health
precautions at the convention.
Organizers also announced
they had canceled all official par-
ties and events that were to take
place before and during the event
in Milwaukee. The number of new
coronavirus cases in Wisconsin is
currently down from a late-May
peak, according to a New York
Times database. Milwaukee
County has the highest rate of pos-
itive cases in the state.

Democratic Convention Will Downsize


By REID J. EPSTEIN

The Democratic National Convention will move five blocks from
the 17,000-seat Fiserv Forum to the Wisconsin Center, above.

KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Same city, but in a


smaller venue, with


fewer delegates.


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