My bolding.

quote:

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended her decade-long record of voting by mail, arguing Wednesday that her public opposition to expanding mail-in voting for other people is not incompatible with her personal use of mail-in ballots.

"Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you're absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person," McEnany told NBC News. "President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason , which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp."

So a pandemic doesn't count as a reason? Interesting logic.

quote:

Like McEnany, Trump himself voted by mail in Florida earlier this year. Nonetheless, he recently told reporters, "I think mail-in voting is horrible, it's corrupt."

When asked how he squared his own practice with his opinion of mail-in voting, Trump replied, "Sure, I can vote by mail. Because I'm allowed to."

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/...-voting-by-mail.html

I’m kinda tired of arguments like this and I’ve stopped reading pundits/spokespeople who promote this nonsense.

Everyone knows why Republicans don’t like vote by mail and insist on gerrymandering every district in the state to an insane degree. Let’s stop overlooking the fact they close down voting stations in all of the poor areas of town. Let’s stop pretending that voter fraud has anything to do with it.

Let’s all take a lesson from Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governator who eliminated gerrymandering in California. We no longer have a Republican problem. The Democrats are doing a bit of running amok but it won’t hurt for a while.

Kayleigh, please stop talking. You are making a fool of yourself.

Thanks so much!

I see this as going all the way back to Lee Atwater, Republican dirty-trickster and general slimeball. He said "all we need to do to win is to reduce the number of people who vote".

Limit polling places, especially in poor and predominately minority areas: Only white collar people can afford to take a day off work to stand in line to vote. People who don't get paid if they don't work can't do that.

Require government-issued photo identification to vote. Lots of poor people don't have a drivers license much less a passport.

And so forth.

Mail-in voting provides equal access to the election. We've been doing it here in Washington State for years. Until recently, if you couldn't afford a stamp, there were many ballot dropboxes, although they were much fewer and farther between in the rural counties. The most populous county, where Seattle is, decided to cover the postage for voters in that county. The rest of the state cried "foul", especially since Seattle leans to the left. So, the state now pays the postage for everyone.

You get your ballot in the mail. You fill it out. You put it in a mailbox. Done. Ballots come several weeks before the election, so you can drop it in a secure mailbox when you go to the store or post office.

There have been some issues with the counting machines, and some questions about the competence of the director of elections in a few counties, but these have nothing to do with voting-by-mail.

Anyway... Lee Atwater. Simply make it harder to vote overall, and the vote will skew to the right.

Yes, PJ. To all of that. Oregon's ballots are now postage paid, I think for the first time.

I might also add that one of the benefits of the mail-in ballot for me is that I can sit with a cup of coffee (or lately, with a strong drink) and educamate myself on some of the candidates to an extent that I probably wouldn't do without the ballot and voter pamphlet sitting on my kitchen counter. YMMV, of course.

I will never, ever understand this fixation to make voting harder rather than easier. Of course it's politically motivated. Grrrrr.

So far studies show no partisan advantage with voting by mail:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...-party-an-advantage/

To the extent that more Republicans oppose voting by mail, may it’s emotional, may be it’s ignorance or misinterpretation of data.

My wife, my daughter, and I all mailed our ballots this week for the primary election here in Pennsylvania. The polling places for our township have been consolidated in a single location and I anticipate that our son will vote there. It will be interesting to see what sort of turnout on election day next Tuesday, although it will be hard to judge. We live in a more Republican township so there is not a lot of activity in the Democratic primary. While there are still delegates for Bernie on the ballot, that's fundamentally an artifact and only one primary race (for state Auditor General) has more than one Democratic candidate.

Big Al