Trump’s commitment to eliminate the posting vote could launch us elections in a tailpin
President Donald Trump threatens to ban the post -sent vote before the country’s mid -term elections – a maneuver that could put the electoral system in disarray and deprive millions of voters that count on this method to vote.
Trump has taken the vote by mail since he lost the 2020 elections and began to boast of falsely on the fraudulent ballots who distorted the result.
This time, he promises an executive decree which will prevent well -established practice once and for all, even if the researchers say that he has absolutely no authority to make a change like that given some of the constitutional realities.
“It is really not a difficult question – the president cannot do it. Period,” said Jeremy Paul, professor at the Northeastern University School of Law who studies the elections, in an interview with CBC News.
The Constitution gives states control of the elections
Paul said that Trump’s promised post ban is a form of “authoritarian fan fiction” which is based on “lies” designed to explain his defeat during the election of the cocovio era.
The founders of the country have planned a tyrannical president, he said, and that is why they have given the States the power to control the federal elections.
However, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress may intervene when it has the impression that the States have lost its way, as it did with the 1965 voting law which was to prevent racial discrimination in the vote and after the voting count in 2000 in Florida.
The founders’ intentions were clearly presented in the American Constitution. States legislatures “will establish times, places and how to hold elections”, reads the secular document, which Trump has promised to preserve, protect and defend.
But Trump did not leave apparently insurmountable legal barriers to stop it in the past.
Setting a wider gap between him and the American president Donald Trump, the Attorney General Bill Barr declared during his last press conference that he did not intend to look into the theories of the conspiracy of a generalized electoral fraud or to investigate Hunter Biden, son of the president elected Joe Biden.
“Trump looks at the electoral landscape and he can say that his party will not manage well in 2026. So he will do everything he can do to disturb the elections according to his anti-democratic program,” said Paul.
“He tries to send a message according to which democracy is an old hat and that we are in a new world now. I hope that our country will not tolerate this. It is frightening. If you are not afraid, you are not careful.”
The long history of voting by mail
Each state of the union has a form of voting by mail or “absent” to facilitate the voting of citizens.
It is a practice that dates back to the American civil war, when former president Abraham Lincoln wanted to give soldiers far from home in politics. Workers, families with child care problems, rural residents and the elderly are others who often turn into voting by mail.
While the practice was favored by the Democrats during the pandemic, the defenders say that there is no history of correspondence ballots distort in a disproportionate manner in one way or another.
Twenty-eight states require no excuse to request a postal bulletin. Eight states – including dark red like UTAH – and Columbia district lead their elections almost entirely by mail and have had it for years.
During the last elections, more than 46 million voting bulletins were sent by mail – or 30% of all the votes expressed, according to the American Elections Assistance Commission.
Trump fully won the elections after swept all the states of the battlefield thanks in part to the ballot by mail, which his team promoted.
Modifications offered “Inviting chaos”
Unlike Canada, where the vote generally involves choosing a single candidate, American electoral bulletins are often unmanageable documents.
During the 2024 elections, for example, the county of Arizona Maricopa needed two pages to press the names of all local officials, counties, state and federal, judges and voting measures under study.
There were 144 elected offices, 45 judges and 76 voting measures for a vote in certain parts of this county, which includes major population centers like Phoenix and Scottsdale.
It takes time to sort so many choices – and have such a long -hand ballot in hand, because Trump now demands his thrust to eliminate machines by 2026, would inevitably lead to long delays in the supply of results.
Barbara Smith Warner, Executive Director of the National Voting at Home Institute, told CBC News that such changes would be so disruptive that it would make it difficult, if not impossible, to have a fully functional election in 2026.
“And it is not a coincidence. It is inviting chaos,” she said.
“This is a direct attempt to deprive voters.
What’s behind this push?
Trump launched his last promise to abandon these ballots after discussing what he called the “fraud” elections with Russian president Vladimir Putin – a disturbing choice for a discussion on democratic reforms given what this leader has done to voting rights in his own country.
Putin orchestrated fictitious elections that would even make the North Koreans blush.
He imprisoned his political opponents and others died in mysterious circumstances. There has not been a real opposition party for years.
“Vladimir Putin said one of the most interesting things. He said,” Your election was faked because you have a vote by mail, “Trump told Fox News after his Alaska summit at the end of last week.
“” It is impossible to have a vote by mail and to have honest elections. “He told me.
President Donald Trump said there was a very good chance of “getting there” to end the war in Ukraine after his summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Putin also launched the idea that Trump went to Moscow for a follow -up meeting.
As a reminder, the former prosecutor general of Trump found no evidence of generalized fraud, a joint study of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Security found no evidence of manipulated electoral results and the final report of the Bartaitite Committee of the Chamber concluded that Trump has engaged in a “conspiracy in several parts” to denounce the elections on the basis of false claims.
Trump was then criminally accused of four crimes for trying to overthrow the elections.
However, in his oval office sit with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday, Trump called the “corrupt” postal ballots.
“You can never have a real democracy with voting bulletins by mail, and we as a republican party will do everything possible for us to get rid of them,” he said.
Smith Warner says that the discussion of these questions with Putin again invites Russia to interfere in the American democratic process, because the American intelligence agencies and a senatorial committee controlled by the Republicans noted it during the 2016 campaign.
“Who takes advice on democracy or the elections of an authoritarian dictator established,” she said about Putin. “He’s not Ben Franklin.”
Rare fraud with voting ballots by mail
There are fraud incidents with voting ballots by mail, but they are rare.
A republican campaign agent in Northern Carolina was arrested in 2021 to claim the voting harvest by absent. In 1997, some Democrats in Georgia were accused of purchasing votes with correspondence ballots.
A study, which examined the vote sent by post over a period of 12 years, revealed that the number of cases of fraud was “infinitesimal” with 491 incidents of fraud by the absent vote reported on the hundreds of millions of votes expressed in the American elections between 2000 and 2012.
In a report on the 2020 elections, the Associated Press discovered approximately 475 potential cases of electoral fraud in the six nearby states he studied, including certain voting cases of criminals and others subjecting ballots for the dead – not enough to change results.
Smith Warner says that Trump’s recent diatribes and allegations of relaunched fraud are only “more lies”.
“Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy,” she said. “If it was not that important, people wouldn’t make you so strong from doing it.”
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