Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
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NEW SERIOUSNESS ABOUT VOTING BY MAIL? The presidential election is less than 100 days away and the potential for disastrous dysfunction in voting by mail is deeply concerning. Yet some Democrats have reflexively defended voting by mail simply because President Trump has attacked it; whatever he says, they feel compelled to say the opposite. Now, however, it appears that some are waking up to the risks of mail-in voting.
People in and around politics seemed to have realized the danger that we will not know the results of the November 3 election until late November, December or even later — and that those weeks of uncertainty could see unprecedented levels of anger, division, and civil unrest around the country.
Look at two New York congressional elections held on June 23. There was a huge increase in voting by mail. But those votes still haven’t been counted. “Nearly six weeks later, two closely watched congressional races remain undecided,” the New York Times reported Monday, “and major delays in counting a deluge of 400,000 mail-in ballots and other problems are being cited as examples of the challenges facing the nation as it looks toward conducting the November general election during the pandemic.”
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The system was totally overwhelmed by a massive increase in mailed ballots. Delays grew. Lawsuits were filed. There was fighting over postmarks. Accusations of disenfranchisement. It all happened because election officials were not prepared for the growth in mail-in ballots. “Imagine saying, ‘I’m having a dinner party for ten people,'” one anonymous board of election source told the Times. “And then they say, ‘No, it’s 100 people.’ It’s a very deep learning curve.”
President Trump weighed in at his news conference. The race in New York’s 12th congressional district is “a total disaster,” he said. “They’re six weeks into it now. They have no clue what’s going on.” The president said he believes New York officials will “have to re-run that race, because it’s a mess.”
If mail-in voting increases enormously in the presidential election — and there is every indication it will — the same sort of dysfunction could beset some key states that have not handled such a challenge before. There might well be no declaration of a winner on election night, or even soon thereafter.
Now, some big social media voices are preparing to tell Americans that there’s nothing unusual at all — nothing to see here — about a presidential election that takes weeks, if not months to decide. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times’ Ben Smith that Facebook is planning to educate users, “getting people ready for the fact that there’s a high likelihood that it takes days or weeks to count this — and there’s nothing wrong or illegitimate about that.” Smith said Zuckerberg told him that “Facebook is considering new rules regarding premature claims of victory or other statements about the results.” How far that censorship might go is anybody’s guess.
AND ON ANOTHER TOPIC, A BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! In the same time that I was starting this newsletter, I was working on a book. It’s now finished and will be published on September 8. It’s called Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump, and it’s about the long effort to remove the president from office, from the events leading up the the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller all the way through impeachment. It has a lot of inside stuff in it, things you haven’t heard about before, and I hope you’ll give it a look.
