In a speech last night at an unusual Republican midterm convention, President Trump told voters to “pretend that I am running.” He also promised to give every adult American $5,000 if Republicans win the House and Senate. (That would cost the government more than $1.3 trillion.) The convention continues today in Dallas.
The midterms are looking like a mess. My colleague Evan Gorelick explains.
And this week brought dueling legal opinions about which map Missouri can use on Election Day. Voters have already nominated candidates based on boundaries redrawn, at Trump’s insistence, to benefit Republicans. But the state’s Supreme Court later said those gerrymandered districts were invalid unless Missourians explicitly approved them, and a justice from the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. (No such vote has taken place.) Then a federal judge said Missouri could use Trump’s preferred map anyway. What is happening??
The answer lies partly in our increasingly polarized approach to elections. Trump claims elections are rigged against Republicans — both to rationalize his own defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 and now to impose new rules before midterm contests that may not go his way. And there are some reasons for suspicion. Russia and China have tried to influence our elections. Polls keep missing the mark. And screw-ups aren’t totally unheard-of: Many Americans remember 2000, when Florida’s voting machines failed to tabulate tens of thousands of ballots.
Yet widespread cheating is a fiction. After multiple investigations, officials have found no evidence that fraud has affected any outcome. Trump’s false claims of cheating, however, are having an impact. Here’s how November 3 could be different this year.
Voting by mail
Nearly a third of voters cast mail-in ballots. Trump wants to control that process by patching together a huge list of U.S. citizens and then refusing to mail ballots to voters whose names aren’t on it. (The Constitution grants states and Congress the authority to administer elections, but the president controls the Postal Service, which would maintain the relevant screening system, my colleague Eileen Sullivan reports.) The U.S.P.S. has proposed not to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over their voter rolls for the master list.That would make voting much more difficult, if not impossible, for tens of millions of Americans — especially Democrats, who vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans. The Trump administration already said it would toss ballots that arrive after the deadline, and more ballots are coming in late this year. A whistle-blower alleged last week that the verification process could reject thousands of ballots that arrive in a batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” fails to scan properly.