Just what Trump was afraid of

People will vote.

In at least four of the eight states that held primaries on Tuesday, turnout surpassed 2016 levels, with most of the votes being cast via mail, according to an analysis of election returns by The Hill. Each of those states took steps earlier this year to send absentee ballot applications to all of their registered voters.

  The Hill

The article lists those four as Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and New Mexico.

The high turnout could encourage more states to take similar steps ahead of the November general elections. Trump has resisted such efforts, even threatening last month to hold up federal funding to Michigan and Nevada over state election officials’ decisions to send mail-in ballot applications to registered voters.

The president’s argument against expanding mail-in voting is two-fold: he has claimed that it not only increases the risk of voter fraud, but it gives a structural advantage to Democrats. Elections experts have knocked down those claims, noting that fraud is exceedingly rare in all instances and that there’s little to no evidence that widespread mail-in voting benefits one party over another.

And voter fraud is not a thing. It's rare as hen's teeth. Almost.

In the states that held primaries on Tuesday, however, the decision to expand mail-in voting was largely nonpartisan, with both Democratic and Republican officials throwing their support behind more robust vote-by-mail efforts.

[...]

“The June 2 primaries proved what we already knew – access to absentee ballots increases voter turnout,” said Tom Ridge, a Republican former Homeland Security Secretary and governor of Pennsylvania, who co-chairs the bipartisan group VoteSafe. “That's especially good news for someone like me who does not believe voting is a privilege, but rather a responsibility of citizenship,” he added. “Voters should have options to demonstrate that responsibility safely and securely during this pandemic.”

[...]

Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington – already conduct their elections entirely by mail. California and Montana also rely heavily on mail-in voting, while 27 other states already offered so-called “no-excuse” absentee voting before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. In the 2018 midterm elections, nearly one in four votes was cast by mail.

But since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March, a dozen other states that require voters to provide an excuse in order to cast an absentee ballot have relaxed restrictions to allow any registered voter to vote by mail due to concerns about the coronavirus.

The latest state to join that list was Missouri, where Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed a measure on Thursday allowing all of the state’s registered voters to request a mail-in ballot for the August primary and November general election. Most voters will still have to have their mail-in ballots notarized for them to be accepted.

Which severely limits the number of people who would otherwise vote by mail.

Four states – Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and Mississippi – have yet to expand mail-in voting practices amid the coronavirus pandemic.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.