AUSTIN, Texas — Can the United States Postal Service (USPS) handle universal voting by mail? KVUE's Bryan Mays posed that question to ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman, who covers voting rights and election administration.
"The post office can certainly handle the capacity. If we think about the ways that policies are changing to make that capacity more difficult to handle then it becomes a little bit more difficult," Huseman said.
Huseman said that despite what some politicians have said, there hasn't been widespread fraud connected to mail-in voting.
"I think the most, the clearest comparison to this – to what is happening right now and the extreme increase in interest and participation in mail-in voting – is most comparable to the five states who have, for the last several years, been doing universal mail-in systems," Huseman said. "Those states include Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii. And all of them have sort of streamlined the process, implemented very clear security."
As for the political divide when it comes to voting by mail, Huseman doesn't see a huge difference in the political leanings of those who would like to vote by mail.
"I think it's difficult for the Republican Party to disagree with Donald Trump and because Donald Trump has made up his mind about vote by mail, you're not going to see a ton of national Republicans go against him," she said.
Huseman said that 70% of Americans report that they would prefer to vote by mail.
"Among the most eager to do so are typically older white voters, who are very much in Trump's constituency," she said.
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