PRESS EDITORIAL: Everyone should be able to vote by mail

One in four Americans, including President Donald Trump, regularly vote by mail.

Five states conduct all elections by mail.

Twenty-one states designate some of their elections for unlimited voting by mail.

Thirty-five states, including Wisconsin, allow absentee voting by mail for every registered voter who requests it without any excuses needed.

More U.S. voters than ever before will want to vote by mail in the November presidential election because the pandemic could make in-person voting risky, reduce the number of polling places and limit the availability of volunteer poll workers.

All of which confirms the truth that the demonization of voting by mail is a campaign aimed at voter suppression.

The president rails almost daily against voting by mail, denigrating it in one of his recent all-caps tweets as “INACCURATE AND FRAUDULENT” and suggesting it could be a reason to delay the presidential election.

Election fraud, though a convenient bogeyman to justify efforts to make voting more difficult, is rare and insignificant, according to numerous studies. President Trump’s own election fraud commission was disbanded without being able document widespread voter fraud or any impact of fraudulent voting on election results.

Although it is obvious that the president believes making it easier to vote benefits Democrats and hurts his re-election chances, many prominent Republicans and party officials have not enlisted in his war on voting by mail, perhaps because they realize it suppresses Republican voting too.

The chairman of the Fond du Lac County Republican Party was quoted this week in a USA Today news story on GOP qualms about the effort to sow mailing-voting doubts. Rohn Bishop said, “What the president is doing when he keeps saying that this mail-in balloting thing is fraudulent, he’s scaring our own voters from using a legit way to cast our ballot.”

Voting by mail is more than legitimate. It is safer and more inclusive than voting in polling places and likely more secure from tampering than voting machines.

Managing the process, not fraud, is the problem with voting by mail. Wisconsin became the poster state for that reality when thousands of absentee ballots for the spring election were not received by voters in time and thousands of completed ballots were not delivered to election officials.

This fiasco was a direct result of Gov. Tony Evers’ failure to act in a timely and decisive fashion to delay the election during the pandemic emergency in the face of opposition of Republican leaders of the Legislature. More than 1.2 million absentee ballots were requested, five times as many as in any previous state election. Election officials and the mail service were simply overwhelmed.

The Wisconsin Election Commission and municipal clerks and staffs will be better prepared for the fall election. A huge number of state residents have already voted with absentee ballots in next week’s primary, and indications are that the voting-by-mail process is going smoothly.

It is up to the states to be ready for the certain surge in voting by mail, but they will need help from Congress in the form of funding in the second-round stimulus bill now being debated to cover printing and mailing ballots and other costs resulting from large-scale mail voting.

Congress also needs to intervene if suspicions are confirmed that the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to manage the heavy volume of mailed ballots is being compromised by cutbacks in mail service forced by the new postmaster general appointed by President Trump.

Thanks to Trump’s assault on its legitimacy, voting by mail is being pushed to join the likes of mask wearing and climate change as nonpolitical issues that are the subject of bitter political warfare.

Voting by mail is not political; it’s democratic with a small “d.” It exists only to help Americans participate in their democracy.