President Donald Trump’s effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election is in full swing. In the past week, he has wrongly called lawful vote-by-mail programs in Michigan and Nevada “voter fraud,” “illegal,” and “cheat[ing],” threatening to withhold federal funds if those states carry out their existing, lawful balloting processes. On Sunday, he tweeted that mail-in vote proponents were “trying to use Covid for this scam.”
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In reality, the President has virtually no legal power to determine how states cast their ballots. But Trump’s effort here seems to be less about exercising actual legal imperatives than signaling to others his desire to fight hard to limit access to mail-in ballots — a particularly critical issue given widespread concerns about public gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, we are about to see a series of legal battles across the country that will determine whether millions of people can vote by mail, and the outcome of those cases could swing the 2020 election.
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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/25/opinions/vote-by-mail-cases-election-trump-honig/index.html