Why I’m voting for Biden: I support the right to vote for each and every United States citizen

September 14, 2020

I yearn for the good old days when the Republican Party was simply trying to gerrymander their way into the majority or using voter ID laws to disenfranchise U.S citizens who just happened to be disproportionately elderly or from minority or low income groups.

This year we’re seeing an all-out campaign by Trump against voting by mail, and the hypocrisy of Republican messaging on this issue is beyond staggering. Don’t believe me? Head to gop.com and you’ll be greeted by a popup video of Donald Trump signing his absentee ballot that he’s going to MAIL IN! And he’s encouraging his voters to do the same! 

Listen to his verbal contortions as he explains that absentee ballots that you mail in are good because “you have to work for them” but mail-in ballots are bad because “you get inundated by these things.” I’m really curious how anyone can be inundated by a single ballot.

He calls mail-in ballots universal, but there are only eight states that offer them. In a Washington Post analysis of three of the states that used mail-in voting in 2016 and 2018, they found a total of only 372 potential problem ballots, which is only .0025 percent of the vote total. As a comparison point, there were 5,332 hanging chad ballots from Florida in 2000. There is not a fraud issue with mail-in ballots.

But let’s be honest, Republican efforts in this area have never been about fraud –– they’ve been about suppressing the votes of those least likely to vote Republican. If it was about fraud, we would have seen some proof by now.  But all we see is claim after claim with no evidence. 

Trump has said more than 100 times this year that mail-in voting is fraudulent. On August 24, he tweeted that “51 Million Ballots that are being sent to people who have not even requested them” and 17 days later, he raised that to a nice solid random number: “Sending out 80 MILLION BALLOTS to people who aren’t even asking for a Ballot is unfair and a total fraud in the making.”

Here’s what seems fraudulent to me: In May of this year, Trump installed mega-donor ($2.4 million in donations) and loyalist Louis DeJoy as U.S. Postmaster General.  DeJoy ran XPO Logistics, a company that has received no-bid contracts from the U.S. Postal Service for decades, and audits show that those non-competitive contracts cost the U.S. government more than $53 million. This is the man now helping Trump dismantle and defund the post office, all in the name of cutting waste and inefficiency.

If for some reason, you’re still taking Trump seriously, please don’t vote twice (as he suggested) because that would be fraud and a felony, and saying “Donald told me to” will not keep you out of jail.