Thread by @doctorow

After the Wisconsin GOP murdered voters by forcing them to vote in person, rather than by mail (citing a nonexistent, evidence-free plague of postal voter fraud), mail-in voting was shaping up to be a 2020 Election Culture War flashpoint.

pluralistic.net/2020/04/18/pol…

1/

Trump's pronouncement that mail-in voting would cost Republicans the election by allowing more voter participation fanned the flames:

pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/rea…

2/

So you got absurdities like the AG of Texas threatening to imprison anyone who opined that voting by mail was safer than voting in person, during a once-in-a-century pandemic (proving, once again, that reality has a very unfair anti-Republican bias).

pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all…

3/

And, in the background, a mad scramble among states to prepare for postal ballots this November:

pluralistic.net/2020/03/27/jus…

4/

But despite this, states, Red and Blue, are actually making serious progress on expanding this postal ballot this November. Even as GOP officials in Kentucky were being blasted with FUD from far-right astroturfers like th Public Interest Legal Foundation, they pressed on.

5/

True the Vote, the Heritage Foundation and PILF are all finding themselves sidelined as state officials side with reality over partisanship and expand their postal votes.

propublica.org/article/ignori…

6/

There'll be vastly expanded postal voting in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and W Virginia.

The reason's simple: voters, R & D, don't want in-person voting during a pandemic. 70% of Georgia voters (for example) want mail-in voting.

7/

If you're cheering this because it'll help Dems, don't get too excited. Trump is (unsurprisingly) wrong when he says vote by mail guarantees "you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again" because not only is there no evidence of widespread postal fraud...

8/

...There's also no evidence that this helps Dems. Indeed, postal voting is very important to older voters who are disproportionately Republicans and also at the highest risk of severe illness and death from coronavirus.

9/

For reasons that can only be described as paranoid (or, more charitably, opportunistic), the GOP seized on postal voting as a bogeyman, likely hurting their own chances at the ballot box. And now they're squabbling with one another, mired in cognitive dissonance.

10/

Some red states are determined to murder voters by denying them the postal ballot, like Missouri, where Gov Mike Parson called it inappropriate. People who vote there will risk death and serious illness. Parson is a Republican (the "party of life").

11/

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation's master database of all known postal voter frauds found 143 cases, total, over 20 years. That's 7-8 ballots per year, 0.00006% of votes cast.

thehill.com/opinion/campai…

eof/