NY Times supports Trump’s claim that mail-in ballots are dangerous, open to massive fraud
Is this a huge deal?
The story: Back in 2012, the NY Times published a major piece on the front page, which explained why absentee voting is problematic, and can include lots of fraud.
This , of course, is exactly what Trump is saying today, while the Times and the Democrats are screaming that Trump is wrong…
Does anybody see a little problem here?
Politics is always full of hypocrisy…but this issue seems a little too hypocritical to just sweep under the carpet. It’s a relevant issue today, (far more than in 2012) and the Times has been in the forefront of making it a major issue --but they are screaming the exact opposite of what they wrote previously.
Here’s a link to the Fox News article.( Yes, it’s Fox–but it has serious backing: quoted sources from the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, which are paywalled.)
Is it a “huge” deal because many people on the right don’t think the NY Times supports Trump, and thinks that this article (that I can’t access so I can’t verify either what Fox news says or the original WSJ article) demonstrates that the New York Times actually supports Trump?
Nope.
Is it a huge deal because many on the left consider the NY Times may as well be supporting Trump due to editorial policies that allow people like Tom Cotton to publish authoritarian screeds, that overplayed the Hillary email scandals and dangerously underplayed Russian-election-interference?
Nope.
Is there some level of hypocrisy at play here? Well 2-out-of-3 of the articles are hidden behind a paywall, which leaves us with the opinion of an opinion columnist who seems to specialise in regurgitating right-wing propaganda, so I’m gonna go nope here until I can actually read the article in question.
So that’s a nope, and a nope, followed up with a nope.
But this is your thread. So in the absence of any more information we may as well try and make the most of it. Do you have an opinion on this? What do you think?
The NY Times article says that the rise in absentee voting “increases the potential for fraud” and then suggests some ways to “improve the process” of absentee voting.
Here’s what Trump has said:
“I’m an absentee voter because I can’t be in Florida, because I’m in Washington,” Trump said. “I’m at the White House, so I’ll be an absentee voter. We have a lot of absentee voters, and it works. We’re in favor of absentee, but it’s much different than millions of people in California. They’re going to send out tens of millions of voting forms.” -CNN, August 14, 2020.
Trump says that voting by mail in Florida is OK because the state “has got a great Republican governor.” -CNN, August 14, 2020.
If Trump, as the most powerful person in our government, were concerned about anything else but delegitimizing the results of the election, wouldn’t he be proposing solutions?
Also, if someone says “absentee ballot good, mail-in ballot bad,” when they are in fact the same thing, isn’t it reasonable to discount said person’s opinion as completely ludicrous?
An article from 2012 about the uncertainty of vote-by-mail, which back then was new to most states, means that they support Trump now? I read that article, and I can’t think of one situation, or even one potential situation, that hasn’t been addressed and fixed in the meantime. They didn’t support not-even-a-candidate-at-the-time Trump back then, and they certainly don’t support him now.
I have a subscription to the WSJ, and checked that Op Ed piece. It’s just a rant, it doesn’t give a lot of details nor does it make a very strong case.
I have to admit, I am not a fan of vote-by-mail, as it’s obviously more open to fraud than in-person voting. But this year it seems like a good idea. There are always costs and benefits. The benefit of avoiding crowds and lines at polling places seems huge this year.
I sure do! The premise of your OP is totally misleading, and your link to an opinion piece that misstates what a New York Times article from eight years ago said does little to nothing to support your thread’s title.
I wouldn’t be able to answer that question without reading the full article. There are virtually no details in that link. For instance, was this an opinion piece? The Times regularly runs opposing opinions on things. Please provide more details.
Well, I’ll be damaged. Either I didn’t let my subscription drop as I thought, or I have a few free articles per month. I’m in. Thanks.
Some relevant quotes:
There is a lot more, but suffice it to say that the article offers a lot of evidence that at least in 2012, mail voting had plenty of issues. To answer the question in the OP on whether or not this is problematic, one thing I would need to see is if these problems have been addressed, or do they exist to the same degree now? If they do not, then I see no problem. But again, even if they do, I still stand by what I said that the Times has an opinion page, and one opinion does not necessarily speak for the paper as a whole. Back in the days when we actually read newspapers, the right side of the opinion page had individual opinions, and the left side did speak for the paper’s publishers. So in this case, I don’t necessarily see any hypocricy.
Strictly thay aren’t “exactly the same thing”. In fact they’re very different. And legitimately have differnt potential for fraud.
But as a practical matter the terms have become synonymous due to sloppy / BS-filled modern political polemic. The distinction now only matters to voting system nerds when speaking precisely to other voting system nerds.
“Mail-in voting” means every registered voter is sent a ballot unsolicited and is able to mail it back.
Absentee voting comes in two flavors, that I call “strong” and “weak”; there are other common labels as well…
In “strong absentee voting”, absentee voting is permitted only for a short list of fairly specific reasons. The would-be voter needs to apply well in advance to be permitted to vote absentee, must identify which specific provision they qualify under, and in some cases provide evidence to support their qualification. If individually approved by the electoral authority, only then are they mailed a ballot to later return by mail. The stringency of requirements and of checking varies wildly by jurisdiction around the US.
In “weak absentee voting” there’s still a requirement for the voter to apply for an absentee ballot, but approval is automatic; no reason or evidence of reason is required. Typically as well, in “weak” jurisdictions the advance notice required to apply for absentee status is shorter.
I read the article. It certainly calls attention to problems with mail-in ballots, but the problems are technical having to do with people not following instructions, problems verifying signatures, and problems with mail. All no doubt valid. But no mention of fraud, which is what the orange menace claims. There was the possibility of some minor fraud at nursing homes, but this can be dealt with.
There is no sense in which an eight year old opinion in any way equates to support for Trump.
Actually, they recently supported the recent Middle-East agreement as an mild improvement. They are still not endorsing him. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
News flash: Major metropolitan newspaper changes stance 8 years later!
Next up: Magazine now says television won’t kill the movie industry!
Oh, the hypocrisy! Doesn’t anybody cling to outmoded fears any more? Why, oh why do people insist on changing their minds?
Washington state has had mail-in ballots exclusively since 2011, and some counties had mail-in only as early as 1993. The WA Secretary of State, a Republican named Kim Wyman, says that for the 2016 and 2018 elections, the cases of potential fraud were .003% of all ballots cast. She’s convinced mail-in ballots are less prone to fraud.
The old NYT piece says ballots got thrown out because of signature discrepancies. Here if there’s a discrepancy, the voter is called to straighten things out. Calling is practical because there are so few cases.
One guy reportedly registered his dog to vote. He was, of course, discovered and got a rather scathing letter from Mark Larson, the chief prosecutor in the King County criminal division: ““It is worth noting that to the extent your actions were intended to expose some purported flaw in the state registration process, you were unsuccessful.”
And it’s not like people voting in person don’t make mistakes either. I used to watch the ballots being processed in Santa Clara county. They were the Votomatic punch card ballots made infamous by Florida in 2000. Unlike Florida, the pair of people going through a precinct’s deck would take care of incompletely punched votes by plucking the chad off, if at least two corners were free. Only one corner or just a dimple? The chad would be flattened into place.
Once in a great while a ballot would have dimples up instead of down and not where the pre-punches were. The ballot had been inserted backwards into the holder and they’d been designed so the holes in the holder did would not match up with the pre-punches. People generally did not use enough strength to push the probe all the way through the card stock and apparently, not look to see if the ballot had been punched at all.
No, they aren’t “very different,” and the potential for fraud is likewise not dependent on the system.
Now there is a distinction between mail-only voting systems such as Oregon’s, which don’t have in-person voting at all, and systems that have both vote-by-mail and vote-in-person options, but every voter receiving a ballot in the mail is merely a form of weak absentee voting. Moreover, the stringency of checking received ballots varies widely across jurisdictions, and there is no rule that says strong absentee voting systems necessarily have “better” or more fraud-resistant processes than those with weak systems. In particular, the ballot President Trump returns because he won’t be in Florida on election day and the ballot Janie Smith returns to that same county just because she’s afraid to go to the polls this November will be subjected to EXACTLY the same processes and verifications. How is her ballot somehow more prone to fraud than his?
A big difference between “absentee” and “mail-in” voting (as the terms are commonly used), that is swept under the rug, is in the sheer volume of ballots to be processed.
“Absentee” voting is generally small in number, relative to the overall voting population. “Mail-in” voting (even if only by request, in this Covid year) would be a much larger number of ballots, possibly 100% of the voters.
These ballots must each be handled manually, individually, to inspect the signature and date on the envelopes at the very least. (Do they have scanners and AI to do that?) It may be necessary to open and separate each ballot from its envelope, unless they have machines to automate that now. And the Post Office never had trouble with a relatively small number of absentee ballots, but the ability to deliver ballots en masse is in question now.
How well different jurisdictions handle that will likely depend on how unusual this year is for them. In all-vote-by-mail states, a lot of the precessing is automated (in Oregon, at least, the first cut at signature matching is done electronically. If a ballot is kicked out by that system, humans look at it), and ballots can be separated from outer envelopes as they come in, after verification. Then, it works just like any paper ballot system once the counting starts. In Oregon, where ballots have to be received by close of polls on election day, it all goes pretty quickly.
In states that normally only have a small number of mail or absentee ballots, where ballots can be postmarked election day but arrive later, maybe a large volume of mailed in ballots will cause problems. But there’s nothing inherent in mail-in voting that will cause delays.
This is true but in 2020 there is a larger context.
If you had a cold in past years, that was no barrier to going to the polls. This year it is. And I’m fairly sure there is more than a 1 percent chance of having a cold on any given day. So vote by mail is the most effective way to cast my vote, even if it has that higher reject rate.
Indeed. And might I take this opportunity to once again state something that is relevant to the OP. One opinion by one writer is just that. Newspapers regularly take opposing stances. It’s not hypocrisy necessarily.
And might I take this opportunity to once again state something that is relevant to the OP. One opinion by one writer is just that. Newspapers regularly take opposing stances. It’s not hypocrisy necessarily.