MN's Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon faces an uphill battle. He is supporting a bill to move Minnesota into a vote-by-mail state during periods of peacetime emergency due to infectious disease outbreaks. There would still be polling places on election day for same day registration and limited in-person voting.
Republicans both state-wide and nationally are not in support of mail-in voting. President Trump has publicly stated he is against mail-in voting, even though he recently voted mail-in to the state of Florida. Reasons given including voting fraud and an unfair advantage to Democrats even though there isn't any proof. Fact.check.org recently reported:
- There is no evidence to back up Trump’s blanket claim that “mailed ballots are corrupt.” Voting experts say the president is exaggerating when he says mail ballots are “fraudulent in many cases.” While the instances of voter fraud via mail-in or absentee ballots are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively rare.
- Trump also falsely claimed that California reached a settlement with Judicial Watch in which the state “agree[d] that a million people should not have voted.” California and Los Angeles County agreed to remove inactive voters from their voter rolls per federal law. But there’s no evidence any of them voted, fraudulently or otherwise.
- And as he has in the past, Trump claimed there’s “a lot of fraudulent voting going on in this country.” Experts say voter fraud is rare.
