Ep. 7 - Vote-by-Mail Is the Future — and It’s Already Here (Season 1)

When President Donald Trump focused his ire on mail-in ballots late last month, Twitter did something unusual. It fact-checked him. His claims that moving away from in-person voting during the pandemic would lead to widespread fraud was unsubstantiated, the company said. His tweets, and that unprecedented tweetback, were just the latest in a spirited debate over the adoption of mail-in balloting brought on by the pandemic threat. But in the state of Washington, the debate is over. For almost a decade, voters in the Evergreen state have elected their leaders and weighed in on initiatives without ever setting a foot in a polling place, all while avoiding any whiff of widespread voter fraud. For this episode of This Changes Everything, Crosscut news and politics editor Donna Blankinship speaks with host Sara Bernard about the fight over mail-in ballots and the lessons that Washington state has been sharing with other states that are weighing their options as they prepare for election season.