Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

From today’s New York Times:

President Trump on Thursday railed against expanding access to mail-in voting, and even floated the idea that the election could be postponed, something he has no legal authority to do.

Top Republicans were quick to dismiss the suggestion of putting off Election Day — but Democrats went further, calling it evidence that the president would stop at nothing to throw doubt on the validity of an election that he currently appears likely to lose.

At this moment of coronavirus-driven insecurity, where do Americans stand on voting by mail? And how many might be persuaded, as the president argues, that the election’s very legitimacy is in doubt?

Recent polling shows that Americans now overwhelmingly support universal access to mail-in voting. In national surveys from the past few months, all taken after Mr. Trump began attacking the idea as dangerous, upward of six in 10 respondents have said that they would favor making absentee voting universally available.

But surveys also reflect how susceptible many people’s opinions can be to misinformation, when it comes to matters of fraud and vote security. For instance, 49 percent of Americans said in an ABC News/Washington Post poll in mid-July that mail-in voting was “vulnerable to significant levels of fraud.” That lines up cleanly with a Gallup poll from April that showed 49 percent of Americans thought expanding access to mail-in ballots would increase the prevalence of voter fraud.

This despite the fact that studies have consistently proved voter fraud to be exceedingly rare — including in the five states that now conduct all their voting by mail.

Read the complete article here.

By Editor