ELECTIONS
Opinion: In-person voting during a pandemic is dumb
Aug 27, 2020, 8:11 AM
People can still vote in-person today but voters need to make sure they have the correct identification. Photo by Samuel Corum, Getty Images
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Why in the world are we still talking about in-person voting during a pandemic?
Five reasons to drop in-person voting:
- Long lines will drive voters away. You don’t want to risk catching COVID by standing next to someone who doesn’t believe in wearing a mask. I don’t have four hours to wait in line.
- In some parts of the country, it will be cold (maybe snowing) on Election Day.
- President Trump needs to get over his insistence on in-person voting because he’s putting my parents, your parents, and grandparents across our nation at great risk. In July 2020, a Kaiser Foundation analysis found that eight of 10 Americans who died from COVID were 65 years and older. Let me boil it down to this: I believe it’s the president’s responsibility to protect Americans, not push an agenda that amounts to playing COVID roulette with the health of voters.
- Only five states — Utah, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii — have a long history and culture of voting by mail only. The other 45 don’t have a history and are not comfortable with voting by mail. But we can and should still give people options to protect themselves and participate — dropping off ballots, using the mail, etc.
- It’s 2020 and time to take voting from old school (stand in line) to new wave (drop your ballot in the mail dropbox). Voters stood in line 50 years ago. Today, it is time to move the country forward. Back then, there were three TV networks to watch the election results roll in. Today, you can get results on your smartphone.
Even Twitter flagged one of president’s tweets for “making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.”
So now the Democrats are using Mail Drop Boxes, which are a voter security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them, are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not Covid sanitized. A big fraud!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2020
