“Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) said in an interview. “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”
The Supreme Court last week struck down Trump’s attempts to regulate mail voting by executive order — by restricting the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward.
Amodei said he was “happy” to hear of the ruling: “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that”
Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.) is an outspoken supporter of the SAVE America Act and has introduced a bill that could allow Republicans to incorporate portions of the elections overhaul in a party-line budget reconciliation bill. But she said a near-total ban on mail-in voting would pose problems for states like hers, where some counties have a single polling place.
“We’re a rural state,” she said. “I understand the concerns about mail-in voting … but I think the solution that I’m in favor of is restricting it and creating these commonsense reforms for it.”
Johnson acknowledged those concerns in his comments Tuesday, saying residents of rural states such as Alaska sometimes find it “very difficult to get to a ballot box, and so they use mail-in ballots very effectively, and I think securely, and that’s something that has to be contended with.”
“There are other states that do it well, and without a problem,” Johnson said. “Our concerns are with the handful, five or six blue states, who abuse this, and California is the avatar for this, because it is so ridiculous.”
In the Senate, where even the narrower House-passed version of the bill has languished due to GOP divisions and a Democratic filibuster, there is also an understanding that the expanded bill Trump wants is DOA.
