early of a Saturday morning

 

CUT TO:

THE ENORMOUS FIFTH FLOOR OF THE WASHINGTON POST.

It looks, early of a Saturday morning, pretty deserted.  Those reporters that are around are young, bright, and presently involved in nothing more taxing than drinking coffee and thumbing through the papers.

HARRY ROSENFELD surveys the scene from his office doorway as WOODWARD approaches, hangs his coat at his desk, not far from where ROSENFELD is standing.

ROSENFELD

Where's that cheery face we've come to know and love?

WOODWARD

You call me in on my day off because some idiots have broken into local Democratic Headquarters--tell me, Harry, why should I be smiling?

ROSENFELD

As usual, that keen mind of yours has pegged the situation perfectly.  Except (a) it wasn't local Democratic Headquarters, it was National Democratic Headquarters--

(WOODWARD is surprised--he hadn't known)

--and (b) these weren't just any idiots, seeing as when they were arrested at 2:30 this morning, they were all wearing business suits and Playtex gloves and were carrying--

(consults a piece of paper)

--a walkie-talkie, forty rolls of film, cameras, lock picks, pen-sized tear gas guns, plus various bugging devices.

(puts paper down)

Not to mention over two thousand dollars, mostly in sequenced hundred dollar bills.

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{"ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN"

Screenplay by William Goldman

Pre-rehearsal version March, 1975}

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September, 2020

a headline in The Atlantic

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

some headlines in today's New York Times

With Cross Talk, Lies and Mockery, Trump Tramples Decorum in Debate With Biden

Trump Allies Say the Virus Has Almost Run Its Course.  'Nonsense,' Experts Say.

Nearly 100,000 Defective Absentee Ballots Sent to N.Y.C. Voters

Pandemic Convinces Airline Workers It's Time for New Horizons

Disney Lays Off 28,000, mostly at Its 2 U.S. Theme Parks

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"The Election That Could Break America"

written by Barton Gellman

The Atlantic

(continued)

...According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people's eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls....

     This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking.  Trump called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, "We're going to have sheriffs and we're going to have law enforcement and we're going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys" to keep close watch on the polls.  For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in "places that are run by Democrats."

     Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents.  An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.  

Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014.  Judges in voting rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.

     Nonetheless, Republicans and their allies have litigated scores of cases in the name of preventing fraud in this year's election.  State by state, they have sought--with some success--to purge voter rolls, tighten rules on provisional votes, uphold voter-identification requirements, ban the use of ballot drop boxes, reduce eligibility to vote by mail, discard mail-in ballots with technical flaws, and outlaw the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward.  

     The intent and effect is to throw away votes in large numbers.

These legal maneuvers are drawn from an old Republican playbook.  What's different during this cycle, aside from the ferocity of the efforts, is the focus on voting by mail.  The president has mounted a relentless assault on postal balloting at the exact moment when the coronavirus pandemic is driving tens of millions of voters to embrace it.

     

This year's presidential election will see voting by mail on a scale unlike any before--some states are anticipating a tenfold increase in postal balloting.  A 50-state survey by The Washington Post found that 198 million eligible voters, or at least 84 percent, will have the option to vote by mail. 

Trump has denounced mail-in voting often and urgently, airing fantastical nightmares.  One day he tweeted, "MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE.  IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY.  WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION."  

Another day he pointed to an imaginary--and easily debunked--scenario of forgery from abroad:  "RIGGED 2020 ELECTION:  MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS.  IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"

By late summer Trump was declaiming against mail-in voting an average of nearly four times a day--a pace he had reserved in the past for existential dangers such as impeachment and the Mueller investigation:  "Very dangerous for our country."  "A catastrophe."  "The greatest rigged election in history."

Summer also brought reports that the U.S. Postal Service, the government's most popular agency, was besieged from within by Louis DeJoy, Trump's new postmaster general and a major Republican donor.  Service cuts, upper-management restructuring, and chaotic operational changes were producing long delays....

In the name of efficiency, the Postal Service began decommissioning 10 percent of its mail-sorting machines.  Then came word that the service would no longer treat ballots as first-class mail unless some states nearly tripled the postage they paid, from 20 to 55 cents an envelope.  DeJoy denied any intent to slow down voting by mail, and the Postal Service withdrew the plan under fire from critics.

If there were doubts about where Trump stood on these changes, he resolved them at an August 12 news conference.  Democrats were negotiating for a $25 billion increase in postal funding and an additional $3.6 billion in election assistance to states.  

     "They don't have the money to do the universal mail-in voting.  So therefore, they can't do it, I guess," Trump said.  "It's very simple.  How are they going to do it if they don't have the money to do it?"

What are we to make of all this?

     In part, Trump's hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general.  Democrats, he said on Fox & Friends at the end of March, want "levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again."

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