Nati Harnik/AP Photo
A voter drops his ballot into a collection box outside the Douglas County Election Commission office in Omaha, Nebraska, April 10, 2020.
Despite the expressed fears of President Trump and other prominent Republicans that voting by mail could lead to more of their fellow Americans casting ballots and thereby dooming the GOP, it turns out that a majority of Republicans, and an overwhelming majority of Americans, want to have that option.
The prospect of contracting the coronavirus, it turns out, concentrates the voter’s mind.
According to an early-April poll of voters in 16 battleground states conducted for the Center for Voter Information and Democracy Corps by Greenberg Research, 68 percent of all respondents and 51 percent of Republicans favored universal voting by mail. Here are the numbers from the poll:
Source: Greenberg Research poll
It actually never made much sense that Republican politicos would discourage voting by mail, inasmuch as the party’s base is disproportionately elderly. For seniors, voting at home can be the easiest option, and in a time of pandemic, much the safest. For which reason, a number of Republican state officials have scrambled to make clear that they support voting by mail, no matter what others (taking care not to name-check that guy in the White House) may say.
Republicans will still seek every possible way to suppress voting, of course. Last Tuesday night, the Republicans in the Kentucky legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that would require voters to present valid photo IDs at the polls—even though all the state’s motor vehicle registration offices, which issue such photo IDs, are shuttered for the pandemic’s duration. But curtailing voting by mail as such isn’t likely to endear the party to voters now that the issue has become one of personal survival.
