The nursing home industry has been pushing for more flexible regulations for years. And they got what they wanted at the beginning of the pandemic. But now, advocates say lax standards are fueling the spread of the virus.
But Trump’s rhetoric has had an effect that could hurt republicans and his own candidacy.
Today, 423,000 Florida Democrats more than Republicans are registered to receive absentee ballots, according to the Florida Democratic Party. The Republican Party did not dispute the number.
“It is sad that the Republican Party’s strategy for winning an election is to scare off-base life with misleading lies and conspiracy theories.” It’s working for now, but it’s a bad long-term strategy that will hurt the party in the future, ”said a Florida Republican consultant who worked on state politics and shared the absentee ballot request form with POLITICO. “A simple Google search will tell you that ‘absent’ and ‘mail-in ballots’ are exactly the same.”
Electoral law expert Rick Hasen said there are different terminology in different states surrounding the vote, but he is not aware of any official or state that shares Trump’s distinction between absentee and mail voting, which fact checkers I have also hit Trump. Furthermore, Hasen said, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the mail-in election states.
Officially, the Florida Legislature changed the term “absentee ballot” to “mail ballot” in state law in 2016. But after decades of common use, the term “absentee ballot” is still used indistinctly by politicians and activists. After all, the act of voting by mail from home requires being absent from the physical voting precinct.
For decades, registered Republicans have been outnumbered by registered Democrats in Florida, but Republican candidates have won statewide, in part due to the strength of the Republican Party’s absent voting program. In 1988For example, absentee ballots were key to Connie Mack’s United States Senate victory, a victory that helped herald the upcoming Republican inauguration of the Florida Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion in the mid-decade. from 1990.
Florida Democrats learned from the Republican Party and began to improve their mail-in voting programs. For 2016, Democrats requested 8,800 more ballots than Republicans and, two years later, increased that margin to 47,300, a number that more than doubled before the March 17 presidential primaries. Now the disparity is nine times greater.
In March, Trump’s rhetoric against voting by mail intensified as the coronavirus pandemic spread and more voters began casting votes from their homes. At the time, Democrats in Congress were lobbying to help states expand absentee voting beyond the five states that currently have elections by mail.
“They had things, voting levels that if you had ever accepted, you would never have an elected Republican in this country again,” the president exclaimed on “Fox & Friends” on March 30. After that, Republicans across the country began to equate Trump’s opposition to “mail ballots” with “all mail” elections.
Today there is a fort partisan division about voting by mail that could make the November election even more challenging.
Republicans note, however, that Democrats have historically been unable to return mail ballots at the same high rate as Republican voters. Additionally, Democratic voters and those who tend to favor Democratic candidates have a higher rejection rate when they cast absentee ballots, often for failing to sign the envelope the ballot came in, studies show.
In the Florida general election, about a third of ballots are cast by mail, a third is cast during early voting in person, and a third is cast on Election Day. If Republicans continue to reject absentee voting, it could put more pressure on the party to physically reject their voters at the polls, risking increased infection rates during the pandemic.
Trump’s assault on mail voting has also raised uncomfortable questions about the voting habits in Florida of those within his administration.
As a newly minted Florida resident, Trump voted by mail in the March 17 primaries and said later that “if you are president of the United States and if you vote in Florida and cannot be there, you should be able to send a ballot” .
Triumph could have voted in person early voting places as he passed them on his way to golf in West Palm Beach, but he chose not to.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has repeatedly voted in Florida while out of state: even when I worked in Washington and had a New Jersey driver’s license stating that he was not a Florida resident.
She said in May that the President believes that “all Americans have the right to vote the way I did if you are someone who works out of state, that your address is in a different state, you have the absolute right to request an absentee ballot and cast your vote by mail. “
Democrats gloat over the Republican Party situation.
“Donald Trump is proving to be more effective in suppressing Republican vote-by-mail efforts than Republicans are in suppressing Trump’s inconvenient tweets,” said Max Steele, a former spokesman for the Florida Democratic Party who is now a rapid response director for the liberal group American Bridge.
