EP. 17 — SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

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Weston Wamp: I’m Weston Wamp and this is “Swamp Stories,” brought to you by Issue One.

Vote by mail. Those three words may be the most controversial in the entire English language as we approach November 3rd, 2020.

For some Americans, it’s the only way they’ve ever voted. No big deal. But for others, vote by mail might as well be code for voter fraud. 

According to recent polling, the toxic fight over these words has gotten so out of control that more than half of Trump supporters and more than half of Biden supporters fear the election is  going to be rigged.

I’ve studied closely what President Trump is saying and what his supporters are concerned about, as well as what Speaker Pelosi has said in response. I’ve pulled in two voting experts to clear the air. To set the record straight about what’s going on across our 50 states as we move closer to the election.

And my conclusion is this: There’s nothing to fear. Not for Republicans and not for Democrats. Let me explain.

This is Episode 17: Setting the Record Straight.

When we vote in America, it looks a little different everywhere.

Every state has its own election laws. Per the US Constitution, states determine the “time, place and manner” of our elections. Even within states there can be differences. In my home state of Tennessee some counties vote on a machine, others vote on a piece of paper.

One of the commonalities in voting across all 50 states is absentee voting. ⅔ of states allow what some call no-excuse absentee voting. And this means that any eligible voter can request to receive, by mail, an absentee ballot without a specific reason, like being ill or out-of-town. 

Some state laws limit absentee voting to certain groups of people. Military, students, and seniors are among the groups of people allowed to request an absentee ballot that is then mailed to them.

Amber McReynolds: First you've got to sign up. So most states you can do that online now, which is a good thing. And that also has expanded quite substantially this year. So Georgia for instance, is a good example of a state that just enacted the online registration system for vote by mail. 

Weston Wamp: Amber McReynolds is one of the country’s top experts on election administration and policy. She’s also the CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute. At the beginning of our conversation I asked Amber to just walk me through the play-by-play of voting absentee, because I’ve never missed an election, but I’ve also never voted by absentee ballot.

Amber McReynolds: And then once that request happens, and I will say, there are some states where you have to fill out an excuse. You've got to mark that excuse on the form. They may or may not accept it. There's still notary requirements and different requirements like that. Some states still require a copy of ID to be presented with the absentee application. So even the application process itself is a little bit onerous.

Weston Wamp: Fortunately, our decentralized election system has some real benefits and works remarkably well, both safely and securely, with control and oversight at the local and state level where you can know your election officials. In red states and in blue states vast numbers of Americans use the mail to vote with no controversy at all.

Now enter a pandemic.

COVID-19 has made in-person voting riskier, and it’s made it more difficult for election officials to hire poll workers and, for these reasons, states have made varying adjustments in order to make in-person voting safer, to expand early voting options, and in some cases, yes, to expand options to vote by mail. 

This has unleashed relentless attacks from President Trump on the idea of “voting by mail.” And despite the fact that he and the first lady vote themselves using absentee ballots, Trump has said that voter fraud and ballot harvesting will be rampant.

President Trump: They have to be very careful because you know the things with bundling and all of the things that are happening with votes by mail. Where thousands of votes are gathered and I’m not going to say which party does it, but thousands of votes are gathered and they come in and are dumped in a location and then all of a sudden you lose elections that you think you’re going to win.

Weston Wamp: At times it’s been unclear to me exactly what the President was talking about. Take his comments in North Carolina in August when he suggested that people might vote twice to test the system. 

President Trump: They’ll go out and they’ll vote and they’re going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way because if it tabulates then they won’t be able to do that. So, let them send it in and let them go vote and if their system is as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. 

Weston Wamp: Now, encouraging people to break the law by voting twice, obviously makes no sense.

But on the larger question of absentee ballots and voting by mail, after watching President Trump for months and listening closely, I began to realize this was mostly semantics. Obviously the president doesn’t want to undermine absentee voting because that’s how he votes, along with a lot of his older supporters in places like Florida and Arizona.

The more I listened, I realized Trump was saying something that mainstream conservatives agree with — that the government mailing ballots out to the masses, known as universal vote by mail, potentially opens the door to fraud, especially if it’s rushed.

President Trump: Absentee voting, great. But this mail-in voting where they mail indiscriminately millions and millions of ballots to people, you’re never going to know who won the election. You can’t have that.

Weston Wamp: A lot of conservatives have felt this way for a long time. But here’s the problem: First, in the states that have so-called universal vote by mail, it’s working like it always has. Second, Trump has left out important context as he’s railed about his suspicions of universal vote by mail. 

I reached out to Tammy Patrick who is a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund and for years was an election administrator in one of the largest counties in America. I asked Tammy where vote by mail, the universal kind that the president describes, actually happens. 

Tammy Patrick: So there are five states that are all vote-by-mail states for every election and have been in some cases like you mentioned Oregon. So Oregon, Washington, Colorado, they've been doing this for a number of years. So there are five states. So add to those three Hawaii and Utah that are all vote-by-mail states. Every election in that state, they mail out a voter's ballot to every registered voter.

Weston Wamp: In those five states, 44 instances of fraud have been found since 1982. So think about this: that’s 44 cases of fraud out of nearly 50,000,000 ballots cast. At 0.00009%, it’s a lower percent of fraud than can be found in US elections in general. 

But more important to this election and the President’s point is that only four states, plus the District of Columbia, have decided this year to mail ballots to voters for the first time. And as you’d suspect, the states that have been doing it this way for years have done it without problems because it’s just another election year for them. But Trump supporters all over the country have taken the bait and they’ve been worried ever since about a rigged election — despite this very important fact that the mechanics of voting likely haven’t changed at all in their home state. 

And I think this frankly is important to remember. Of the states deciding this year to mail actual ballots, and not just an application for a ballot, only Nevada has any real possibility of being competitive in November.

So what you’ve got here, when you cut out the hyperbole, is that Trump basically talked about this concept of universal vote-by-mail so much that many of his supporters appear to be thinking it’s happening everywhere.

Tammy Patrick: It is confusing because in the United States, of course, all of our elections are so localized that we sometimes use the same words to talk about totally different functions as part of our elections. And sometimes the same function is called five different things across the country. 

Weston Wamp: Now in my opinion, after this election, we ought to have a good, long healthy debate about the pros and cons of mailing everyone ballots. But right now, we ought to focus on making it abundantly clear that it’s not happening in 80% of our states including the swing states that we’re all about to be on the edge of our seat about on November 3rd — Iowa, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Florida. These states aren’t mailing voters ballots.

Now, to be fair, there’s another side of the coin. There’s a reason that polls show Biden supporters also fear a rigged election. 

And it’s no wonder, as misinformation has been widespread and misleading images about the election have gone viral. For example, Vox had to debunk a tweet that went viral showing mailboxes stacked up at a facility in Wisconsin. But it turns out they were stacked up in the parking lot of a company that has a government contract to refurbish mailboxes. 

Speaker Pelosi has made her own case that Trump is trying to undermine the election — claiming that he’s attacking the Postal Service to help his chances at staying in the White House.

Speaker Pelosi: From what we see at the Postal Service, the removal of mailboxes, the removal of equipment within the postal offices and the rest is to undermine the Postal Service at a time when the Postal Service is needed now more than ever. The actions this administration are taking vis-a-vis our voting system — our sacred right to vote — are a domestic assault on our Constitution.

Weston Wamp: Whatever you think about the motives behind President Trump’s threats to hold back funding from the Postal Service, Tammy Patrick says that, actually, the US Postal Service is doing just fine when it comes to its ability to handle absentee ballots.

Tammy Patrick: So the Postal Service, in this global pandemic, they've been inundated with online shopping and packages. And sometimes that gets conflated with letters and flats, which is what the ballots are. And because of the global pandemic that has been increasing packaging, it's actually been decreasing their letter and flats. So a lot of businesses aren't mailing out flyers and promotional materials for their products and businesses. So the first class and marketing mail, those numbers have actually been really low.

The United States Postal Service can handle upwards of 500 million pieces of mail a day. With a global pandemic they actually have only been running about 400 million mail pieces, you know, on their kind of busy days.

So it's not a question of the Postal Service not being able to service the volume of ballots coming in. That's not a problem at all. But I think when we talk about service delays, everybody thinks of the package that they didn't get on time, because I think we all had a package we didn't get on time. We've all seen it. But in this moment it's really important to know that there are protocols in place that I myself have helped set up over the last decade or so for election mail. And that election officials and the Postal Service are working very closely together to make sure that ballots are being prioritized.

So it is not a problem with the volume of mail, even if every election office in the country mailed their ballots on the same day, which we don't in the United States, they're spread out over a month. It would still literally be a blip on their radar.

Weston Wamp: So on the one side Americans are worried about the integrity of the election because they say the government is sending mail ballots to everyone — despite the fact that only four states have actually made that decision this year. And on the other side, Americans are worried about the integrity of the election because they think President Trump has weakened the Postal Service — despite the fact that the Postal Service has the capacity to move a ballot for every American in a single day.

But a reasonable concern that some of my fellow Republicans have expressed is purely a logistical one. How will states that have never mailed ballots to all voters handle a brand new process in an important election, in a pandemic? And again, it’s only four states we’re talking about that have made the decision, this year, to go to universal mail-in voting because of COVID. Amber McReynolds points out that Nevada and New Jersey actually benefit from a trial run that happened earlier this year.

Amber McReynolds: New Jersey sent ballots out in the primary to all electors. So, that did a couple of things. That's actually a good thing for November that they did that, primarily because now they're going to mail ballots again. They've already identified folks that maybe are not at the addresses that they were before. So they've already identified address changes because they already sent a piece of mail, which means that when your ballot goes to an address where you're no longer at, you become undeliverable. So in a sense, New Jersey's primary experience actually has improved the process greatly for November.

And I also think New Jersey is a great example of a state where they kind of did this for the first time in the primary. Much better to do it for the first time in the primary than do it in the general when you have much higher turnout. So I think that actually having that experience for them is a good thing.

Same with Nevada. They did the same thing. They expanded quite substantially in the primary. They're much smaller than New Jersey. 75% of voters in Nevada live in Clark County. But also Nevadans have voted early for a long time, whether that be by mail or early before election day. They've been a state where 70% of votes have been cast before Election Day.

Weston Wamp: These are highly polarized times — no doubt. But we’ve got to keep our wits about us and trust our institutions and keep things in perspective. Despite claims of vote by mail being expanded, in 46 of our 50 states the way that voting works has hardly changed at all. And frankly, in the four that have, those just aren’t the states that are likely to determine who the next president is. 

We need to trust that all fifty states have their own rules and their own officials overseeing all of this. And whatever you do, go ahead and make a plan for how you’re going to cast your ballot this year.

Tammy Patrick: Having done this now for almost 20 years, I know that people like to procrastinate. We do that as a species. And so my fear is that people will wait until the deadlines rather than making an application early on and provide themselves with lots of options. If you wait till the deadline, or if your plan to vote is November 3rd, you don't leave yourself any plan B. But if your first plan to vote is to request a ballot, vote by mail, then if anything does happen, you do have the opportunity to remedy it or to have a backup plan in place. So, that's what keeps me up at night.

Weston Wamp: Vote based on your convictions. But I implore you, no matter which side you’re on, share what you’ve learned in this episode. Push back against narratives that are designed to create confusion or undermine confidence. We’re about to experience again the most sacred of our traditions. The average American only has the opportunity to vote in 15 presidential elections in their lifetime. And as Amber McReynolds shared with me, no amount of fear mongering or disinformation should distract from the importance of exercising your right to vote.

Amber McReynolds: It doesn't matter what your affiliation is. It doesn't matter who you're going to vote for. You have a constitutional right to access and to vote and to let your voice be heard. And our democracy is stronger when everyone can experience that.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of “Swamp Stories,” we’re going to take a look at the 2000 recount in Florida and see what we might learn about what’s in store for the country this November.

Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better? Rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, producers Evan Ottenfeld and Sydney Richards, and editor Parker Tant from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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