Mail-in ballots

President Donald J. Trump, burned in 2020 at the height of Covid by some states’ shenanigans ranging from rule changes regarding absentee voting to registration requirements, is now on a quest to reform mail-in voting and traditional ballot tabulation machines. On August 18, the President posted the following missive on Truth Social: “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.” Some of the voting practices the President has critiqued are unusual, to say the least.

It’s nicknamed “the Keystone State” because, if my memory of junior-year Pennsylvania history class serves me, in America’s early founding it was the arch stone holding together the handful of other young states. Fast-forward forty-eight states and nearly 250 years, and Pennsylvania remains a powerhouse, particularly when it comes to politics. And this year’s elections could very well have it deciding whether the keystone continues to uphold the nation. US News and World Report has ranked Pennsylvania as “potentially the most important swing state in this year’s race for the White House.” The Commonwealth ties for fifth place with Illinois for the highest number of electoral votes — nineteen.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The Republican Party has new leadership, with North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley and daughter-in-law of the former president Lara Trump taking over an organization that will, in reality, be run by Chris LaCivita. They’ve already made one controversial but wise decision in demurring on the hiring of Scott Presler, a ballot harvester popular with the MAGA crowd. But they now confront the harsh reality of the RNC’s fundraising woes: they’re well behind the Joe Biden campaign and the DNC. The Democratic president’s campaign account officially reported taking in $21 million in February, according to its report filed with the Federal Election Commission late Wednesday, ending the month with $71 million cash on hand.

“Ballot harvesting.” To some, it’s a creepy term, conjuring images of hulking party machines plowing through passive fields of citizens, threshing their votes and delivering them to the ballot box. To others, the whole thing seems practically a conspiracy theory — a catch-all for sore losers who can’t understand how voters could have rejected their team. Feelings aside, ballot harvesting is a reality for much of the country. In twenty-seven states, your ballot can be returned by someone other than you. Further, only twelve of those twenty-seven have any limit at all on the number of ballots a person can turn in, meaning an eager harvester can show up with dozens or hundreds of ballots.

At a drinks party in Washington DC just after Donald Trump was elected, someone from the old regime told me: ‘This will end with tanks on the White House lawn.’ It was a popular opinion that night, although there was confusion over whether the tank barrels would point inwards or outwards. Would Trump do something so outrageous that he would have to be removed by the US military? Or would he declare himself president-for-life with help from the generals? At the time, I put this down to shock at Trump’s unexpected victory, an early example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now, in the final stages of the 2020 campaign, you hear speculation like this from both sides of the political divide. Dictatorship, state of emergency, civil war?