Trump Has Absolutely No Power to End Mail-in Voting
I am extremely fortunate to have served as Chair of the New York State Assembly Elections Law Committee and am very proud that my bill providing for early voting became law.
That was very meaningful to me on many levels. When I was 5 years old, my mother took me to our local police station to vote in the presidential election. We entered a curtained booth, and she filled out a paper ballot and stuffed it into a box.
Later, when my father got home, my mom told him she had taken me to vote and that she had voted for Adlai Stevenson.
He immediately grabbed me and threw me in the back of his car and drove to the police station. Smoking his cigar, he took me into the same curtained booth and filled out his ballot and stuffed it into the same box. He then looked at me and announced that he had voted for General Eisenhower and that Eisenhower was going to win. It turned out that he was right.
My parents were both first generation Americans. My grandparents were Jewish refugees who came the United States to escape czarist pogroms. In my family, the right to vote was and remains sacred.
The Elections Clause of the United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 4) guarantees that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
The founders explicitly denied the president any role in this process for the very best of reasons. No president has the power to end mail-in voting.
Given the chaos and the lies advanced by President Trump over the course of the last 7 months, it was no surprise that he now claims he will issue an Executive Order terminating voting by mail in the United States. It is no surprise that he lies when he states that mail-in voting is fraudulent. Nor is it any surprise, although it is certainly hysterically funny, that he confides to us that his pal Vladimir Putin told him that voting by mail is undemocratic. Trump couldn’t find a smarmier or more corrupt tyrant to counsel him about the American democratic process. Not having mail-in voting guarantees Putin election victories in Russia.
Resistance against tyranny is enshrined in our American spirit. We will not be ruled by czars.
Assemblymember Charles Lavine represents New York’s 13th Assembly District in Nassau County.
