Voting by Mail: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

for our main story tonight i'd actually like to talk about how the president spent the first half of his week because for some reason in the midst of 40 million americans unemployed 100 000 americans dead and racial tensions boiling over he chose to spend his days focusing on this president trump overnight taking to twitter to take on twitter along with other social media giants for what he calls political bias it comes after twitter for the first time added a fact check footnote on two of his tweets that called mail-in ballots substantially fraudulent yeah twitter fact-checked the president's tweets they're also apparently fact-checking other tweets as well but clearly not all of them because we just tweeted luke is the best hemsworth and so far that has not been flagged as a damaging lie and come on twitter either your system works or it doesn't it is a known fact that the order goes chris hemsworth liam hemsworth no hemsworths then luke but it is worth taking a look at the underlying statement that caused twitter to act trump's claim that voting by mail in this year's elections will be substantially fraudulent because that is a favorite subject of his he's tweeted about it a ridiculous number of times in the last two months and he brings it up constantly mail ballots a very dangerous thing for this country because they're cheaters they go and collect them they're fraudulent in many cases the mail ballots are corrupt in my opinion and they collect them and they get people to go in and sign them and then they they're forgeries in many cases it's a horrible thing now what he just said there was complete and actively harmful to the democratic process but in a weird way it's almost comforting to hear him busting out his classic 2016 hits about voter fraud and rigged elections it brings you back to a simpler time doesn't it when we could go to restaurants freely we had no idea what zoom was and we were sure that an obviously unqualified presidential candidate was going to lose in the historic landslide oh 2016 you truly were the good old only less horrifying in context days and the thing is voting by mail is a popular idea 70 of us are in favor of allowing any voter to vote by mail if they want to and if this pandemic continues into the fall as it almost certainly will many voters will want to do exactly that because think about it holding an in-person election during a pandemic is an absolute nightmare elections usually involve hundreds of people cycling in and out of a single enclosed location plus polling places are often located in communal buildings like schools and nursing homes and many of those are out of the question right now even keeping poll workers safe can be difficult because according to one estimate while the typical voter may encounter only about 20 other people when they go to the polls the typical poll worker will encounter about 700 and many are understandably concerned about that i never thought i'd say this in my time but this really scares me this kind of thing i never thought i'd see it for mcgee and a majority of poll workers they're retired in their 60s or 70s and health experts say this age group is among some of the most vulnerable to the virus even if we have a line of 10 people how are we going to keep everybody you know safe from the germs we have a touch screen we'll have to wipe that down every time are we supposed to have people bring their own pencil no of course not and not just because they shouldn't have to but also who the hell owns a fully functioning pencil i mean sure you might have one with a usable eraser but an unusable tip or maybe you have one with a sharpened tip but the eraser's gone or maybe you've got one with a functioning tip but the race is all hard and leaves like a brown streak on the paper and yeah you could sharpen any of these pencils but with what a pencil sharpener you don't own one of those or unless you do in which case just ask me this where is it exactly if you think you're in any way prepared to bring a working pencil to a polling station and you my friend are living in a fantasy world now that woman actually decided not to work her state's primary out of fear for her safety and many voters share her concerns but not all state officials are addressing those concerns especially well just listen to missouri's governor mike parson offer advice ahead of next week's local elections there you know i hope people feel safe but to go out and vote but if they don't you know the number one thing is their safety should be number one so if they don't um then then don't go out and vote you know you know i don't know like i've ever heard myself say that but but you know if you didn't feel safe then i wouldn't do that well hold on there voting is a right it has to be easy to understand and accessible to everyone unlike say hbo max what the is that by the way does anyone actually know how do i get it i'm on it and i don't know and why is it so purple it's like i'm watching television from inside grimace's and not in a good way now there are a lot of ways to mitigate the dangers here but perhaps the biggest is expanding the option to vote by mail you know the thing that trump lies about so often twitter finally decided to step in so tonight let's take a look at why the option of voting by mail is so necessary why concerns about it are often overblown and why talking about it right now is actually really important and let's start with the fact that we actually have a pretty good lesson for just how badly an election during a pandemic can be bungled thanks to wisconsin they held their primary just last month and it was absolute chaos partly because their democratic governor had tried to delay it only to be thwarted by the republican-controlled state legislature and supreme court and the republican assembly speaker robin vos tried to reassure people that everything was safe while volunteering as a polling place but something about how he delivered that message was a little unconvincing you think voting in person is putting people at risk today i don't i mean i look at this and say to myself that we have every single opportunity to be safe do you robin do you because you're sending two very different messages there your mouth is saying don't worry everything's safe and cool but it's being slightly undercut by the fact your dress code is chernobyl casual and unsurprisingly many didn't buy his assurances due to safety concerns there was a massive reduction of polling sites in some big cities with milwaukee's 180 polling sites being reduced down to just five resulting in massive lines and adding to the chaos was the fact a record number of male ballots were requested hundreds of which never arrived or arrived late all of which resulted in sites like this immuno-compromised woman casting her ballot while wearing a garbage bag and no one should have to wear a garbage bag because they're trying to vote you should only have to wear one because you're trying to shed excess water weight so you look extra jacked oh yeah i haven't stopped my pump routine just because of the lockdown i still catch the diesel express every day the sun don't shine before this swollen eclipse runs its course you might as well put me in a tortilla with some salsa and lime because my beef is shredded and look having been put into this position you can kind of understand why the voters in wisconsin were so pissed this is so wrong this is just so wrong this this election should have been called off you know they're telling us to stay in the house and you know stand six feet from each other but then one of the most important times they're forcing us to come out here stop playing politics with our lives yeah that must have been frustrating because you can't pretend coronavirus has stopped for a day in order to hold an election it doesn't give a about democracy it's just one of the many ways that covid19 is the donald trump of infectious diseases it's also of course weirdly shaped and disproportionately harmful to minorities and remember that was just a primary november's general election will have a much higher turnout so how do we prevent what happened in wisconsin from happening 50 times over well one obvious answer is to make it easier to vote by mail but some argue that that's a dangerously radical proposition everyone's afraid everyone's rethinking how we do things should we do it a new way and that's okay we should be open-minded why haven't we had mail-in ballots for the last 230 years maybe the reason is mail-in ballots are an invitation to widespread fraud and manipulation and if you want to rattle people's faith in the system that we've had for centuries maybe you would do that i don't know oh i'm sorry you don't know oh well first off tucker thanks so much for admitting that one of the biggest problems with modern discourse is that people think admitting a lack of knowledge is a sign of weakness when it's not is it it's how we learn and grow as individuals so it's really heartening to see someone in your position admit that they don't have all the facts facts like for instance that we've had voting by mail since the civil war and that one in four americans actually cast a mail ballot in the last two federal elections so your premise that voting by mail is a new idea that would shatter democracy it's in fact completely wrong and deeply stupid that's not a reflection on you though is that you just engaged in a dialogue in good faith so thank you unless you weren't doing that in which case go yourself you human boat shoe so clearly the question isn't should we have voting by mail at all because we already do it's how hard should we make it and depending on where you live the answer to that question can vary widely for instance if you live in these five states congratulations you already have universal all-male voting where a ballast is automatically sent to every eligible voter now if you live in these 29 states you can request an absentee ballot for any reason if you live in these 16 states you do have to provide a reason to vote absentee and while these 11 have at least in some cases allowed the fear of coronavirus to be a valid one these five states have not also almost no states have decided whether or not it'll be a valid excuse for the general election this november and that's not even getting into some of the other restrictions that states have put in place the most ridiculous of which is alabama where to vote absentee you have to submit a photocopy of your photo id in addition to signing it before a notary or two witnesses and the argument for putting limit on voting by mail is that if you don't do that people will just cheat think about the voter registration records in states that have not been purged by that i mean dead people have not been removed you can request an absentee ballot in that name have it mailed to a different address saying you moved but you know the person's dead and then say you're back at the old address and go and vote okay now while that might sound plausible to you at first just think how many steps you'd have to take to successfully make that happen first you have to know a dead person that's hard to do they're anti-social then you have to know that they were registered to vote when they were alive then you have to fill out a form to request an absentee ballot email to your address instead of theirs now to do that you'd likely have to redo their entire voter registration which will require you to know personal information like their address date of birth the last four digits of their social security and possibly their driver's license number and date when it was issued but okay let's say that you do all of this and you get their ballot in the mail you might also have to know what the dead person's signature looks like to convincingly forge it because it could be compared to their signature already on file and you would better hope that that notification of their death never reaches the elections office through any of the routes that it could as despite what just janine would have you believe voter roles go through periodic list maintenance including cross-checking social security death records and having done all of this and remember told authorities where you live if you're caught you're risking several felonies which in many states involve prison time or to gain the grand total of one vote it is a crime that's difficult high risk and low reward it's as if at the end of oceans eight we learned that sandra bullock had gone to all the trouble of breaking into the met gala to steal a map of state quarters sandra why that's twelve dollars and fifty cents worth of quarters that's a complete waste of your time kate blanchett's time and most importantly rihanna's time and look fraud can happen in mail in voting opponents love to cite a 2005 bipartisan report that said absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud but what they don't mention is that in practice it's still incredibly rare in oregon in 2016 out of the more than two million votes cast by mail there were just 54 cases of suspected voter fraud that is 0.002 percent and to hear oregon's former secretary of state tell it there's a pretty good explanation for that vast majority of oregonians are don't care about politics to the level that they're willing to risk prison time for it yeah of course they don't the only vote oregonians would risk prison over would be a vote to get portland trailblazer damian lillard into the mvp conversation you know what they'd be right to do that dame dollar for life and look i am not saying that voting by mail is perfect mailed ballots are rejected at a higher rate than those cast in person and it doesn't work for all communities some people with disabilities need to go to an in-person voting place for help casting a ballot and places like native american reservations and remote alaskan villages may have unreliable postal service plus if you vote by mail you probably don't get one of those i voted stickers which if you live in louisiana means you might not have got this actual sticker featuring a truly excellent pelican look at this absolute king it's hard to pick my favorite part of this his steely blue gaze his crown that says the state of louisiana has a monarch and i am it or his prominently displayed earring despite not having any ears to speak of no question here that large water bird what an incredible motivator to get out and vote in louisiana that will obviously backfire when everyone right in that pelican as their choice for governor but advocates argue that vote by mail is still a good idea that would reduce obstacles to civic participation but that in and of itself may be why it's become so controversial conservative opponents often speculate that any increased participation would benefit democrats despite the fact researchers have consistently found that it hasn't obviously helped one party or the other and yet some are willing to go to extremes to fight this texas a g threatened to prosecute anyone who encouraged people to get an absentee ballot because they were afraid of the coronavirus and the lieutenant governor there has been doing some truly trump caliber level fear-mongering when you have an opportunity to steal a vote the democrats will take advantage of it and this is what it's all about there is no reason capital and capital oh no reason that anyone under 65 should be able to say i'm afraid to go vote have they been to a grocery store they've been to walmart or they've been to lowe's they've been home depot have they been anywhere have they been afraid to go out of their house no this is a scam by the democrats to steal the election look far be it from me to challenge the wisdom of a well-read guy whose bookshelf is only half occupied by footballs but going to the grocery store doesn't mean people aren't afraid it means they need to eat at a certain point hunger outweighs fear which is also incidentally the official slogan of taco bell but even in states that try to fight it the odds are that there will be a lot more people voting by mail come this fall which brings us to our final point how will states handle that well first they need money fast some estimate the costs of properly running the 2020 elections during the pandemic could reach 4 billion and unfortunately the cares act directed just 400 million to states which is just nowhere near enough and this funding needs to come quickly some jurisdictions are going to struggle to handle a high volume of male ballots in fact take the swing state of pennsylvania which only had 107 000 absentee ballots in their 2016 primary but received applications for over 1.8 million this year and coping with surges like that won't be easy it could require hiring and training dozens of additional workers to process ballots or purchasing machinery costing up to a million dollars per unit and if you are going to do that you need to decide right now because machines like high-speed scanners and sorters can take several months to order and safely install all of which makes it more than a little concerning that some like missouri governor mike parson the man you saw earlier telling voters to stay at home if they didn't feel safe some of them have argued that everyone should relax because there's just no rush to deal with this right now it's about repairing or being prepared for clover 19 doing what we can for that it's about getting the economy started back up it's about people moving back to work there'll be time to talk about the elections in november in august but now's not the time for that there'll be time for that but now is absolutely the time to talk about this you cannot prepare for an election the same way you update your computer's software by just putting it off a month on end and secretly hoping that maybe you'll be dead before you actually have to deal with it we need to get this right now and it doesn't stop there officials should also be communicating to voters exactly how to get a mail-in ballot when they need to do it by and how to properly fill it out and there's there's actually one last thing that we may need to personally prepare ourselves for and that is that in november if there is as seems likely a surge in mail in voting it may take much much longer for all the ballots to be counted in fact we may not know who's won until a few days after election day and if it doesn't look good for donald trump look for him to use that to show discord among his supporters i'm just kidding of course he'll win in a landslide and his victory speech will be taking a on the stage to thunderous applause that's really in keeping with the vibe 2020 has set so far but regardless there are a few things that you can do here if your state does allow voting by mail you can request and return your absentee ballot early this will help flatten the curve of vote tabulating on election day and as a reminder if you need a stamp these little beauties are available for two more weeks and there's there's actually one last problem that we may be able to help you with here because if the thing that's stopping you from voting by mail is not being able to get a fun free sticker we have you covered there we've designed four of them that you can print out at home including one that says i wanted people to know i voted by mail so i printed out this sticker one that says i voted by mail with an image of this hamster and a speedo one featuring a ghost with an x through it and the caption i'm not dead and i voted by mail and finally in the spirit of louisiana one featuring this emu wearing a top hat with a nose ring for no reason whatsoever all of these are available for you at i voted by mail.com and i would seriously consider doing it because if you vote by mail not only will you be exercising your civic duty you'll also be making tucker carlson really mad and what better incentive is there to do absolutely anything than that you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 9,180,957

Keywords:

Id: l-nEHkgm_Gk

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/22bebo]

I would buy that "Baddest Motherfucker" mug in a heartbeat and I do not drink hot drinks.

[u/Puncharoo]

This was a spicy one. An extra "Fuck You" to Tucker Carlson and his non-stop hate-spewing garbage chute he calls "News"

[u/Thursdayallstar]

Is it just me or has the writing been especially spicy lately?! Like, damn, drop another bomb!

Ps, would totally rock that hamster sticker.

[u/jhsounds]

That feel when I watch the episode on HBO Max as he openly makes fun of HBO Max. Well done.

[u/carry_bean]

No adam driver compliment though it's weird I was expecting one In this one lol

[u/chucky144]

Fuck you Tucker Carlson, you human boat shoe!

[u/junanw]

first 3 mins

mail voting part 1

mail voting part 2

final segments

[u/vote-by-mail]

easy to know if you can, and how to https://vote-by-mail.info

[u/carry_bean]

The shredded beef and swolar eclipse made me laugh. I also flexed as well