President Donald Trump has been on social media recently reigniting his crusade against mail-in ballots and voting machines in favor of watermarked, written ballots.
According to nonpartisan voting advocacy group Verified Voting, more than half of votes cast already use written ballots. Democratic Congressman Tim Kennedy says mail-in voting is something that the government should be leaning into instead of fighting.
“The attack on mail in voting is another attack by Donald Trump on democracy itself," he said "We need to be able to hear from the people. And mail-in voting, and the expansion of mail-in voting, should be the norm, and it should be something that we embrace, not something we attack.”
Republican Congressman Nick Langworthy was not available for comment.
Former State Senator Ed Rath, who once served as the ranking Republican on the state senate’s elections committee, says there needs to be a long look at the role of mail-in ballots in current elections. While mail-in options were needed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the emphasis should shift back to getting people to vote in person, he said.
"We should go back to the model that we had before, where someone was out of town or someone had an illness, or perhaps a student, they would apply to the board of elections and they would receive an absentee ballot for mail-in balloting purposes," Rath said. "It shouldn't be the norm. It should go back to an exception."
Similarly, voting machines are another aspect Rath believes needs to be utilized judiciously. While maybe not the standard in every voting situation, machines do play an important role to increase voters' ability to participate, Rath said.
"You have to make a system that is as accessible and as as voter friendly as it can be," he said. "But you also have to make sure ... that it is a system and a process that is is one that we can make sure that there is no fraud, there's no corruption, there's no abuse of the system."
Trump’s original comments on Truth Social do not indicate whether his criticism of voting machine-use is specific to ones that let people vote electronically, or also machines that count ballots.
