May 20, 2020

Why Do Republicans Hate Vote-By-Mail?

Neal Waters/ZUMA

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More threats from our hydroxychloroquine-addled commander-in-chief:

President Trump escalated his criticism of voting by mail, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan after the state announced plans to send applications for absentee ballots to all registered voters ahead of primary and general elections due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly complained about voting by mail, tweeted Wednesday: “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!” He also inaccurately said the state was sending out absentee ballots, rather than applications.

….Mr. Trump has often threatened to withhold funds from cities or states over policy differences without following through. It wasn’t immediately clear what funds he could hold up. The recent stimulus funding designed to provide states with coronavirus support is already law.

The weird thing about all this is that vote-by-mail doesn’t really favor either party. Republicans are petrified at the thought of all-mail elections, but it’s not clear why. Just tradition, I guess, since Republicans are always opposed to anything that might make voting easier. If they were smart, they’d get on the vote-by-mail bandwagon and then put some of their impressive voter suppression brainpower to work on how to use this to their advantage. There’s gotta be a way, right?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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