"A Record 75% of Americans Can Vote by Mail in 2020." That was the headline of a New York Times story on Tuesday. And here's the breakdown:
* 21%, or 43 million voters in nine states and Washington, D.C., can - and about half have - been able to have ballots mailed directly to all voters.
* 54%, or 108 million voters in 33 states can absentee vote with no excuses.
* 25%, or 51 million voters in eight states - including Tennessee - may absentee vote only with an excuse.
Make no mistake - we believe everyone should be able to vote in the most convenient way possible. And in our view, "excuses required" amounts to those states - Tennessee included - looking for some excuse NOT to make it easier to vote.
But we also must understand that in Donald Trump's excuse-prone mind, mail-in voting will give him another excuse to be aggrieved - perhaps even to refuse to leave the White House. After all, he's already suggesting as much.
Consider: We likely can count on this new record three-quarters of all American voters being eligible to receive a 2020 ballot in the mail as meaning - if recent energized voter trends hold - that 80 million mail ballots will flood election halls this fall. That's more than double the number returned in 2016, according to The New York Times. Can't you already hear Trump's ALL-CAPS anguish?
For this, we can thank the novel coronavirus pandemic - a situation that has both soured many voters on Trump and has forced many states to make adjustments on the fly to avoid more COVID-19 exposures.
Tennessee is a perfect example. In June, a Davidson County chancellor ruled that the state's limits on absentee voting during the pandemic constituted "an unreasonable burden on the fundamental right to vote guaranteed by the Tennessee Constitution." She ordered that Tennessee must give all of its 4.1 million registered voters the option to cast ballots by mail during the pandemic.
(That worked for the primaries, but may not for November: The Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the chancellor's rule, meaning that merely fearing exposure to the novel coronavirus will not remain a qualifying excuse for absentee voting here unless it is again appealed and reversed.)
It's no secret the expansion of mail voting is uneven and basically breaks along party lines.
If you think that would be because President Donald Trump fears losing his re-election bid (he trails badly now in almost every average) and falsely decries mail voting as rife with fraud, you'd be correct. Several states identified by The Cook Political Report as solid or likely Democratic in the 2020 general election have implemented some of the most expansive mail voting programs, while many states identified as solid or likely Republican have continued to restrict access to mail voting.
Those GOP-likely and leaning hold-outs include Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Indiana.
Never mind that studies repeatedly have found that voting fraud of any kind is extremely rare in the United States (unless you count Russian interference). What's more, states and counties that have transitioned to all-mail voting have seen little evidence of partisan advantage.
But don't waste your breath trying to convince Trump and the GOP of this. Facts interfere with their propaganda machines.
The proof in the pudding of this is evidenced by the Trump administration's breakneck race to hobble the Postal Service where a lack of funding and the Trump-appointed postal leadership has cut overtime and ordered mail left uncollected and undelivered. If that continues, ballots may not get sent or returned by postmark deadlines.
And if Volunteer State primaries were any indication, we'll not get much help from our local election commissions either. Hamilton County provided for no ballot drop-off boxes on Aug. 6, requiring instead that all absentee ballots had to come through the postal service.
Georgia, too, accepted mail ballots because of the pandemic, but created bottlenecks for in-person voting in the Peach State's most populous and heavily minority counties with hours-long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and sheer incompetence at stations stocked with 15-20 touch screens but only a single scanner to process all those printed ballots.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie thinks Trump seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns and other snafus. Any and all of those things could give election officials a better shot at dismissing votes before they're even counted.
"If Trump is leading on election night," Bouie writes, "there's a good chance he'll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends - if we experience a 'blue shift' like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in - the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as 'fake news.'"
Bouie continues: "The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person."
We hope not. But a call to the local election commission to see if the next best option - a secure "drop box" - might be available in November went unreturned.