How In-Person Voting Can Save America

by Nils Gilman and Keri Leigh Merritt

Nils Gilman is vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute and the cofounder of the Transition Integrity Project. Keri Leigh Merritt is the author of the award-winning “Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South.” She is currently working on a new documentary on the American Civil War.

Despite the risk associated with the pandemic, in-person voting is our best way to save both democracy and America.

It is understandable that people want to vote by mail, particularly while we still lack a national strategy for dealing with COVID-19. Amid a raging pandemic, maintaining social distancing is the socially responsible thing to do to. Urging mail-in voting has therefore been at the core of the Democrats’ messaging for months.

For any other election, this would be sage advice. But there is an obvious problem with this scenario: Because many states count absentee and mailed-in ballots only after election night, and because these votes tend to skew heavily Democratic, President Trump has suggested that he may claim victory on the basis of the votes cast on Election Day, which would effectively disenfranchise millions of Americans.

For healthy, low-risk voters, voting in-person and early is a direct way to thwart his outrageous strategy. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has held a consistent lead in all the polls for the last four months, hovering between +6 and +12 nationally. He has narrower but also steady leads in several important swing states, including Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and is running within the margin of error in states usually written-off by Democrats, such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas. If these numbers hold up, Biden should cruise to victory.

But this faith in the polls has one profound flaw: It assumes that everyone who wants to vote will be able to do so, and that every vote will be counted.

After months of falsely claiming that voting by mail risks fraud and “rigged” elections, while simultaneously sabotaging the functionality of the post office, Trump is now brazenly asserting that his reelection strategy is to “get rid of the ballots.” While the right has a long and well-documented history of engaging in voter suppression and disfranchisement, never before has a candidate frankly touted fraud as an actual strategy.

Read entire article at The Hill