At her weekly news conference on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blasted Trump’s aversion to voting by mail. “Well, we had a different values system about what voting means to a democracy. And, clearly, we want to remove all obstacles to participation,” she said. “That’s why we’ve had major disagreements with the Republicans on voter suppression that is rampant and their values system and other obstacles that they have put forth.” She added, “No surprise that he might dismiss opening doors of participation as something that is a plus, especially in a time of a pandemic. … This is a matter also, though, of public opinion. Why should we be saying to people, ‘Stand in line for hours,’ when we don’t even want you leaving the house? Some of these primaries that are taking place now or are being put off. Why does it make sense?"

There is zero evidence that voting by mail is more vulnerable to fraud, or even that it favors Democrats, which is Trump’s underlying motive for attempting to discredit the practice. “Studies have shown that all forms of voting fraud are extremely rare in the United States. A national study in 2016 found few credible allegations of fraudulent voting,” the New York Times reports. “A panel that Mr. Trump charged with investigating election corruption found no real evidence of fraud before he disbanded it in 2018.” As to voting by mail specifically:

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Five states, including the Republican bastion of Utah, now conduct all elections almost entirely by mail. They report very little fraud. The state is among the six states with the highest percentage of mail-in votes in the last election in 2018, all of which had Republican state election supervisors at the time, according to David J. Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Reform. Colorado, which has 3.5 million registered voters, has been a vote-by-mail state since 2014. “There’s just very little evidence that there is more than a handful of fraudulent (vote-by-mail) cases across the country in a given election cycle,” said Judd Choate, the director of elections in the Colorado Department of State.

The evidence is likewise scarce that Democrats benefit from vote-by-mail. Writing in the conservative National Review online, Rachel and Joshua Kleinfeld explain: “The No. 1 group that votes by mail now are the elderly, who tend to vote Republican. As the elderly are also the group most affected by covid-19, voting by mail might help them the most.” While high voter turnout has been thought to benefit Democrats, “Studies of vote-by-mail in Colorado and Utah have found increased turnout among a diverse assortment of groups, including young voters, voters with no party affiliation, and women over 80, benefiting no party in particular.” They advocate that voting by mail as well as drive-up voting that allows voters to cast ballots from their cars using a sterilized tablet provide the best alternatives to voting in person if the pandemic still rages.

Indeed Democrats are wary of mandatory voting by mail because there is some evidence it disadvantages their voters. The Times reports, “ One reason is the finding in some studies that black and Latino voters — two key groups in the party’s base — are less likely to embrace mail voting than white voters.” Likewise, younger voters, who tend to vote Democratic, as well may not have an up-to-date address so may not receive ballots. (Pelosi recognized this in her news conference, recalling, “I can say with some knowledge, as a former chair of the California Democratic Party, the largest party in the country, that we would always do much better on Election Day than we did with the vote by mail. The Republicans know how to vote by mail.”)

Increasingly, not even Republicans are buying into Trump’s scaremongering about voting by mail. New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu changed his tune on absentee voting and said on Thursday that his state will “allow voters to cast mail-in ballots in the November general election if the coronavirus is still a factor this fall,” The Post reported. He also will explore a drive-up voting option.

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Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is also a proponent of voting by mail. He said regarding the practice at a news conference on Wednesday, “You know, we postponed the election, or we expanded the election basically, because we didn’t think it was safe, but yes, it’s safe for people to vote in Ohio and we’re asking them to do that.” The office of the Republican state secretary of state in a written statement argued:

Though we are preparing for every possible scenario, our expectation and hope is that we’ll be able to have a normal election in November. That said, it’s fortunate that Ohio has a long history of running secure elections, and that includes decades of voting by mail. From voter-specific ballot tracking and frequently maintained voter rolls to security measures at county boards of elections where ballots are handled and stored by a bipartisan team of election officials, Ohioans can be confident that their vote-by-mail ballots are as safe and secure as the votes cast on Election Day.

Perhaps the most powerful argument in favor of voting by mail was the spectacle in Wisconsin this week, when thousands of voters lined up in the midst of a pandemic, effectively risking infection and death, to vote.

The state will investigate the effect of voting on the infection rate. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, “It’s too soon to say how the decision to allow thousands of Wisconsinites to converge on polling places in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years will reshape the state’s disease curve. Modelers say to expect better data on that in a couple of weeks, when people infected Tuesday begin to get sick.”

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In other words, we will see how many people get sick or die because Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature refused to postpone the election and because the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend the date to return absentee ballots (thereby forcing those who had not received their ballots to show up in person or be disenfranchised). Perhaps that will convince states to ignore Trump’s disinformation and prepare for greatly expanded voting by mail. They surely do not want more deaths on their hands.