Tag: Donald Trump

President Trump has expressed concern about states, particularly the key election states of Michigan and Nevada, changing their voting rules this election year to shift to mail-in voting in the name of safety because of the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Increased mail-in voting increases potential for fraud, so naturally this should be a bipartisan issue, right? You would think the Democratic party might have an interest in protecting Democracy and specifically – the citizens rights to have their vote counted and not illegally cancelled out by a fraudulent tally. But no… the Democrat party and its partisan defenders take the opposite position and ridicule the concern in the first place.

Straw-manning the issue

The first tactic to ridiculing a point with merit to it is to remove the merit and argue against an alternate dumber version of the argument in a technique known as the Strawman Fallacy.

While Trump has been rightfully suspicious of the fast track attempt to use mass mail-in voting as the standard for this years election, Trump critics bashing him on this strawman his position into “any vote by mail is bad” which is a much easier position (that he never took) to tear down, especially since military votes are by mail and Trump himself votes absentee ballots. This technique was used to roast the President as a hypocrite by media who made no attempt to give readers a glimpse into what the actual concern expressed is or might be.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza summed up this dumb non-point on a CNN.com article (which is notable because it would be one thing if a journalist displayed this level of lack-of-journalism on their blog or social media profile but to do so on their platform of alleged journalism only validates via illustration, Trumps claim that CNN is Fake News):

President Donald Trump made very clear that voting by mail — an alternative many are suggesting to deal with the ongoing stay-at-home directives — is a very bad thing. And more than that, he suggested, it’s deeply corrupt.”No, mail ballots, they cheat,” said Trump. “OK, people cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they are cheaters.”

You might have noticed that Trump is not terribly thorough and precise with every sentence that casually references another that he’s said in that moment or the week prior when he speaks off the cuff to an audience that knows (or he thinks knows) what he’s talking about (like supporters at a rally or members of the press) and this makes for easy attack points by dishonest media critics to just isolate those moments instead of doing that journalism thingy where they aggregate the facts on the topic together and report them in a way to inform the people of the Presidents position. Instead, these corporate press outlets pluck these moments out of any further explanatory context and rebut the literalness of those isolated phrases rather than the collective explanation. The above quotes are not the only comments the President has said, yet Cilizza uses those and those alone to dishonestly summarize his position. With the false premise that “Trump thinks no one should ever vote by mail”, the premise is set for the “gotchya”. In reality, the lines above were spoken, as I noted, in reference to his previous comments on the subject regarding hastily expanded mass mail-in voting and Trump made the mistake of mentioning it in a press conference where he assumed the reporters attending would have been good enough at their jobs to know the subject matter.

Nah. Instead of referencing the larger issue, a reporter was all “uhhm, didn’t you just recently vote by mail?” and Trump was all “Duh. Yea. You can do that in Florida and I was in the White House so I voted absentee” and the reporter was like “how do you reconcile that?” and Trump was like “Wtf b*ch”. *(Paraphrased / not a real transcript).

Cilizza used the actual back and forth, where the reporter actually did say “How do you reconcile that” and Trump said he was in the White House, probably not even catching on that the reporter was trying to trap him and thought she was just being stupid, and then called it “obvious hypocrisy” instead of the non-contradictory reality it is. The lying title of that Cilizza article, btw, is “Donald Trump’s blatant hypocrisy on voting by mail” even though only an approximate 26 lines of the post (including the “how do you reconcile that?” transcript) are dedicated to that false premise and 56 lines afterward acknowledging the higher propensity of mail-in fraud, but making excuses for it as not a big enough deal to do anything about…

The problem with mail-in fraud

Cilizza gets to the point that “The problem is that Trump thinks absentee voting is good for him but not for other people. Because of, er, fraud.” – which again, is false. Trump never said or implied anything about the current absentee voting system in place – his comments were only about rushed state wide mass mail-in voting – but Cilizza can’t just be out there writing posts like “Trump is right about this issue” – so first came the false “lol what a hypocrite” thesis that headlined the post, and then buried underneath comes the acknowledgement of the issue at hand:

Now, what Trump is right about is that absentee voting and vote-by-mail have been the places in the recent past where the small amount of voter fraud that exists has been discovered. (Nota bene: The only difference, effectively, between absentee voting and vote-by-mail is that in the former you have to request a ballot while in the latter a ballot is sent to you.)

Yea… doy…

The concern is, again, not that registered voters who mail in their ballots are currently doing a bad thing, but that a new policy automatically mailing ballots to millions of people that didn’t ask for them, comes with the obvious potential of mailing voter fraud opportunities. Without a thorough review to do this right, you’re potentially sending millions of ballots to people who don’t exist or are ineligible voters.

For such a policy to avoid this obvious loophole for election theft, the voter rolls would have to undergo a re-indexing to update the Governments inefficient system of doing seemingly simple tasks it manages to fail at like keeping track of people who moved, are registered in multiple states by accident or on purpose, who have died or have been convicted of a felony that makes them ineligible to cast a vote.

Trying to make the non-controversial a controversy

Situations like this where journalists want to editorially slant a message but not completely bald-faced-lie about it entirely do so by couching the truth they don’t want focused on in a swarm of “yea, but still”. Again – I’m picking on CNN’s Chris Cilizza here, but only because his article on the subject was so exemplary of the others who did the exact same thing in the same way. In his pre-mentioned article he admits to national mail-in fraud but when talking about specific examples, makes sure they are only ones that are obscure, hyper-local, and from a long time ago, such as one in the Democratic primaries for local offices like sheriff in “the late 1990s” (couldn’t give an exact year, bro? “1997” is in both the top of the article and its URL…), quoting from what “The New York Times wrote back then“:

“Many of the absentee voters were assisted in voting by supporters of various candidates after claiming that they could not read (sometimes despite high school or college degrees) or that they suffered from physical maladies (one saying he had been kicked in the head by a mule).”

More recently than the “the late 90s”/1997, in “the early aught-tens” (2012), a piece published by the New York Times titled “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises”.

The Times article reports that election administrators say that just the increasing trend of more people choosing to vote by mail “will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud”, noting in particular that voting by mail contains “vastly more prevalent” fraud than the in-person voting fraud that most media attention surrounds. Despite being from 2012, it offers more pertinent historical record highlights than CNN-Cilizza’s 1997 Georgia sheriff primary example, such as:

In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.

The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy. “The right to have one’s vote counted is as important as the act of voting itself,” Justice Paul H. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court wrote while considering disputed absentee ballots in the close 2008 Senate election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.

Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.

Which is exactly Trumps stated concern that Cilizza and other Trump critics are trying to dismiss. One has to wonder why that might be…

Vox writer Aaron Rupar responded to this with the headline “Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-interested reasons for opposing mail-in voting” with the byline quoting Trump saying “For whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans”, calling that an example of President Trump “saying the quiet part loud” when it comes to his opposition to mail-in voting. The reality is just the opposite: disproportionate Democrat votes in increased mail-in ballots than exist in the rest of the voting tallies suggests evidence to exactly Trumps concern about fraud.

In that same Vox piece, Rupar totally makes stuff up about to boost mail-in voting by claiming Trump totally makes stuff up to discredit mail-in voting:

However, Marc Thiessen writing in the Washington Post that, Trump’s concern about mail-in ballots is completely legitimate brings further examples, not the least of which being that:

A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, concluded in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Carter and Baker also pointed out that citizens who vote at nursing homes “are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.” In Florida, there is even a name for this: “granny farming.”

Thiessen also notes items of consequence that the higher rates of mail-in ballots not even being counted are undisputed.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities. That is a failure rate of more than 21 percent. In 2008, it did not matter because the election was not particularly close and mail-in ballots only accounted for a fraction of votes cast. But imagine the impact that would have in a close election in which mail-in voting is tried on a massive scale.

Again: more than a tiny bit suspicious that so called “Democrats” would be downplaying these known threats to democracy, no?

As admitted by Cilizza (again – in his article that calls Trumps absentee voting “hypocritical”), Thiessen also cites the difference between absentee votes and a state-wide change to mass mail voting:

Moreover, there is a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats are demanding. Under the Democrats’ plan, ballots would inevitably be sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation — an invitation for fraud. Add to that the danger of what Democrats call “community ballot collection” (a.k.a. “ballot harvesting”) where campaign workers collect absentee ballots in bulk and deliver them to election officials, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Seems more like the validation of Trumps concern about a rushed change of plans to enact state-wide mail-in voting this election year is far from controversial – it’s nearly universally agreed upon by data published and opined in the same sources that are attacking this concern (NY Times, WashPo, CNN, just to name the 3 quoted in this post by me).

Know who else agrees? Chris Cilizza…

In the same article mentioned several times in this post – the one dubiously calling Trump a hypocrite in the title and claiming that voter fraud shouldn’t be a concern, Chris Cilizza says the same thing as Trump. Specifically that:

So, there’s no question that past history has suggested that absentee balloting and vote-by-mail are more likely than in-person voting to be subject to bad actors. Which makes sense since the vote is being cast, usually, in the privacy of your home, as opposed to at a polling place with official poll watchers and election officials not only keeping an eye out for any irregularities but also taking the ballot from you as soon as you cast it.

-Chris Cilizza, CNN

Which, again: