Tom Ridge: For His Own Good, Trump Should Stop Knocking Mail-In Voting

Jun 17, 2020

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Tom Ridge is the former governor of Pennsylvania, from 1995 to 2001, and went on to become the first ever head of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

In March, Ridge and a former Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, formed a group called Vote Safe, which is pushing to expand access to voting by mail. Every state has different rules for its elections, and Ridge believes that's a better system than a nationalized one, but the point is that you need to know your state's specific rules. Some of the best websites I've seen to do that are vote.org and votingrightslab.org. I'll provide links in the show notes to their key pages. I'll link to some of their key pages below.

Ridge did not vote for Trump in 2016 and spoke out publicly against him during the election. But Ridge's appeal to Trump's self-interest is part of the 74-year old Vietnam veteran's effort to promote mail-in voting.

"You've got Republican incumbents and challengers who are going to be using [mail-in voting] in order to hopefully either be reelected or gain advantage as a challenger. And so there's a disconnect between the president and I think the balance of the party," Ridge said.

Ridge said that many Republican-leaning voters in a state like Arizona -- where 80% of ballots are already cast by mail -- will likely want to vote this way. "You really can't expect them necessarily to wait in line three or four hours. Or they may say to themselves, 'Because of my health concerns, I'm not going to the polls. I want to vote absentee,'" Ridge said.

"Mr. President, you have all the machinery. Take advantage of it," Ridge said.

Here are the pages on each state's rules:

https://tracker.votingrightslab.org/states

https://www.vote.org/absentee-voting-rules/

https://www.vote.org/voter-id-laws/

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