Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) on Monday signed legislation allowing all eligible residents to vote early via mail for state primary and general election contests, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin announced.
WWLP notes:
Under the new law, all registered voters who wish to vote by mail will be able to do so and in-person voting will be expanded to make voting more convenient and safe to avoid large crowds.
In-person early voting will be available for the State Primary which is August 22-28. The in-person early voting period for the November State Election has been expanded to include 2 weekends and will be held October 17-30.
“I am very pleased that this bill has been signed into law, allowing voters and election officials to plan for everyone to be able to vote safely this fall,” Galvin said in a statement. “I am also glad the new law includes the additional in-person early voting I proposed for both the primary and the election.”
In May, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed an executive order permitting all registered voters in the state to vote by mail in the upcoming presidential election due to concerns over the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Newsom said while providing residents the opportunity to vote by mail, he is committed to facilitating physical voting locations on election day. The governor stated at the time:
There’s a lot of concern and excitement around this November’s election in terms of making sure that you can conduct yourself in a safe way and to make sure your health is protected and to make sure we are reaching out to all registered, eligible voters. And giving them the opportunity, giving them the choice not to feel like they have to go into a concentrated, dense environment where their health may be at risk but provide an additional asset and additional resources by way of voting by mail.
Despite Newsom’s order, Breitbart News previously reported: “Recent data has not shown a compelling public health justification for mail-in voting. In Wisconsin’s April election, only 52 of more than 400,000 voters and poll workers were confirmed to have contracted the Chinese coronavirus. None of those cases were fatal. This equals an infection rate below two-hundredths of one percent.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly slammed Democrats for pushing vote-by-mail, warning it could “destroy this country.”
“We’re not going to destroy this country by allowing things like that to happen. We’re not destroying our country,” the president has said. “This has more to do with fairness and honesty and, really, our country itself.”
Last month, Attorney General William Barr warned mass mail-in voting “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”
“Those things are delivered into mailboxes. They can be taken out. There’s questions about whether or not it even denies a secret ballot, because a lot of the states have you signing the outside of the envelope,” Barr told Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “So, the person who opens — person who opens the envelope will know how people voted. There’s no — right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots, and [it would] be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot. So, I think it can — it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections. If anything, we should tighten them up right now.”
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