Josh Mandel would end voting methods used by every state, disfavoring elderly and working voters

Absentee voting is used in all 50 states, including red states and blue states, and is most used by retirement age people, but Senate candidate Josh Mandel would abolish it:

This would be an extreme restriction on voting access, and a radical departure from American tradition.

Republicans use absentee voting too

Mandel thinks we should “eliminate early voting and vote by mail”, options used even in heavily Republican states:

• Floridians can vote by mail upon request for any reason. 43% of their voters over 65 years old mailed their ballots in 2016.
• Texans may vote by mail if they’re at least 65 years old, sick or disabled, out of the country, expecting to give birth, or someone in jail who hasn’t lost their right to vote.
• In 2020, 62% of Trump voters used voting options that Mandel would eliminate: 32% by mail-in ballot and 30% with early in-person voting.

Lots of people can’t get to the polls on election day

Mandel wants only a single day of voting, which would disenfranchise many types of voters:

• In 2016, 31% of retirement aged Ohio voters used mail-in ballots, even before the pandemic.
• Our election day polls are usually open for 13 hours, but some folks work 12+ hour shifts, including nurses and police officers, which makes it hard for them to get to the polls if they have to work that day.
• Truck drivers don’t always know ahead of time when they’ll be driving out of state and may need to vote early.
• Busy mothers juggling the responsibilities of raising a family may have difficulty getting to the polls and may prefer to vote absentee.
• Among Ohio’s top 247 cities, 8% of households have no vehicle and mail-in voting is a more accessible option for them.

These are all good reasons why 44 states allow early in-person voting and 34 states allow voting by mail for any reason. Ohio has both, but Josh Mandel would strip these options away from us.

Federal takeover?

Mandel calls Democrats’ voter protection efforts a “federal election takeover”, yet he is running for federal office and trying to shut down voting options himself. He doesn’t say whether he would support a Congressional bill to outright ban absentee voting, but when a Senate candidate weighs in on an issue, we have to wonder if he would put those ideas into law.

Denying states’ ability to offer voting options before election day would be federal overreach, and would hinder many voters who rely on them. Even if Mandel doesn’t push this idea into federal law, any use of his influence as a potential US Senator to encourage such a major rollback of voter access is a threat to democracy.

Naked partisanship

Mandel openly admits that he wants to reduce voting options in order to benefit his party’s candidate:

Whether you believe America is better off with Biden or Trump in office, the way we settle that question in America is by letting citizens vote and respecting the results of an election, not by drastically eliminating voting options to skew the results in your favor.

Mandel unscrupulously pushes for more fighting and less bipartisanship. He insists the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, while evidence shows the opposite: that Donald Trump committed criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of federal law.

Mandel says he would have rejected the votes of millions of Americans on January 6th, and praises Jim Jordan and Ted Cruz who did just that. He has called for “decertification” of Arizona’s election results. He also calls Raffensperger a “traitor”, the Georgian Secretary of State who wouldn’t cave in to Trump’s possibly illegal pressure to “find” more votes or to “decertify” their results.

Since Mandel is willing to reject legally cast votes, it’s not surprising that he might also support extreme measures to discourage votes from being cast in the first place.

Voter fraud is a serious crime, but it’s rare and bipartisan

Part of Mandel’s support of the Big Lie is to associate absentee voting with fraud and with Democrats.

I’ve already shown that states run by Republicans have chosen to keep more than one day of voting, and that a large majority of Trump supporters chose to utilize it in 2020. Tens of millions of voters from both parties used absentee voting without any intention of committing fraud.

Voter fraud is much more rare than Big Liars claim, but it does happen, and it’s committed by Republicans too. Just in the first page of results in the Heritage election fraud database, here are a few examples:

• Two different registered Republicans in Arizona each illegally voted using their deceased mothers’ name: Tracey Kay McKee and Krista Michelle Conner.
• Cheryl Hall, a Republican activist in Florida, was prosecuted for falsifying 10-30 voter registrations by altering or removing the party affiliation of Democratic voters without their knowledge or permission. This would affect those voters’ ability to vote in Florida’s closed primary elections.
• GOP candidates Neil Kitchens and Alex Campbell criminally falsified information about where they live in California to get on the ballot, and were charged with felonies.

Mandel is wrong to accuse one party of voter fraud, because a very small percentage of voters from both parties do it.

Mandel’s election reform plan

His campaign website doesn’t mention his plans for election reform, so we have to look to his social media posts. Generally, he argues for the elimination of mail-in voting, for “one day” of “in-person voting” and “no early voting”. However, he sometimes argues against “mass” mail-in voting instead, which leaves us wondering if he’d carve out room for a little mail-in voting, surely at least for overseas military. This subtle distinction provides no clarity or assurance that he wouldn’t deny voting options for as many groups as necessary to get his candidate into office.

This tweet is our best insight into Mandel’s plans for election reform. Here are some relevant notes to consider:

• 39 states do not require strict mandatory voter ID, including these 15 states that Trump won in 2020: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. Every state does require some way to verify a voter’s identity, such as a billing statement or signature verification.
• Same-day registration is used by 21 states, including Idaho, Utah, Iowa and Montana which Trump won.
• Universal mail-in ballots are used in 7 states, including Utah.
• He also argues for “no voting machines” and a “return to paper ballots”. Every state in America uses some form of machine for casting votes, although printing out a verifiable paper trail is considered more reliable.
• More election audits are also part of Mandel’s platform, although Arizona’s partisan audit that reiterated Biden’s victory resulted in Mandel calling for their results to be “decertified” anyway.
• The ACLU and other pro-democracy advocates raise concerns about flaws in strict signature verification and discriminatory effects of strict voter ID.

Elections should be secure, accessible, and respected

There’s room for reasonable debate about the tradeoffs between election integrity and accessibility, including the pros and cons of same-day registration, universal mail-in ballots, voter ID, voting machines, etc. We can also have a good faith discussion about the proper scope of federal voter protections, and when a state’s voting requirements are justified or unduly burdensome.

However, Mandel’s elimination of widely used absentee voting for partisan advantage is beyond the pale, and would take our country backwards. Even Trump-supporting Congressional candidate Jonah Schulz doesn’t go that far, arguing for specific reforms but keeping for-cause absentee ballots and over a week of early in-person voting:

Josh Mandel’s vision for democracy is extreme and regressive, and he’s shown that his judgement cannot be trusted.

Mandel loses primary election

On 5/3/22, Josh Mandel lost the Republican Senate primary to JD Vance.

Further reading

Josh Mandel rejects the principle of Separation of Church and State, denying the wisdom of founding fathers James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Read more about Mandel’s push for theocracy here.

Census.gov: Majority of Voters Used Nontraditional Methods to Cast Ballots in 2020