Two-thirds of US voters back mail-in presidential election in November despite Trump’s objections

A new poll has found that close to two-thirds of the US electorate are in favour of conducting November’s presidential election entirely by mail.

The findings come in spite of many Republican leaders’ insistence that mail-in voting is an invitation to rampant electoral fraud ​— an idea lately propagated by the president himself.

In the poll, commissioned by The Wall Street Journal and NBC, the people polled were asked whether they favoured changing election laws to allow everyone to vote by mail in general; those who said no were then asked if they favoured changing the law for this year alone “given the concern that the coronavirus may still be contagious this fall”.

All in all, 67 per cent agreed that in the current circumstances, they would support changing the law so that mail-in voting was available to all Americans.

Some states already vote entirely by mail, among them Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon and Utah. Washington state has used postal balloting for some time; officials there have cautioned that other states looking to set up mail-in systems in time for the presidential ballot have a difficult task on their hands, with everything from procuring equipment to deciding on postage fees having to be completed in just a few months.

Massachusetts, which primarily uses in-person voting, has seen several of its members of Congress calling for the state to change its methods. Some of them are pointing to the chaos of the recent Wisconsin primary, in which voters were obliged to queue at ballot stations for hours despite the state’s lockdown orders. Multiple coronavirus diagnoses have now been connected to the primary.

Those opposed to expanding postal voting, generally on the Republican side, argue that “vote harvesters” are able to manipulate mail-voting systems, including by voting on behalf of deceased voters or those who have moved house without updating their addresses.

As with the supposed voter fraud problems that the same critics use to justify exclusionary Voter ID laws, while examples can be found of people abusing all voting processes, there is no evidence that these are widespread problems.

Donald Trump — who commissioned an investigation into alleged fraud at the 2016 election that failed to find anything — recently tweeted out his disgust at postal voting, and made clear that he expected his own party to stand in its way out of self-interest.

“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting,” he wrote. “Democrats are clamouring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

As a reporter pointed out at a White House press briefing, Mr Trump himself votes by mail. Asked how he reconciled that with his statements, he responded: “Because I’m allowed to”.