Hi John,

What happens when a president loves his power more than he respects your rights? Well, we’re seeing it firsthand. After an abysmal showing at his latest road show in Oklahoma, the President has gone into overdrive to keep you from voting safely by mail. Now, there’s no lie he won’t tell to stop you from enjoying the same liberties that he himself has often enjoyed.

That’s right, Donald Trump himself is a mail-in voter. So is Mike Pence. And the new press secretary? She’s voted by mail 11 times in the last decade. Trump’s campaign manager voted by mail in 2018. Rona McDaniel, the chair of the RNC who pushes videos that lie about vote-by-mail, also enjoys absentee voting.

It sure looks like voting by mail is a liberty that Donald Trump only wants for himself and his friends. So much so, that this November they will all vote-by-mail again, even as they fight in courts and in Statehouses to keep that right from you. Why? Because they want you to be too scared to vote, to have to risk your health in a pandemic they failed to control in order to exercise your rights.

That’s their best hope: to win by silencing you.

We can’t let them get away with it. We have to counter their lies. Because the truth is, vote-by-mail is safe, and already widely done in America. No, you can’t just print ballots like Trump claims. And no, you can’t just steal them and sign them yourself. There are safety measures, the same safety measures that caught Trump when he tried to vote from the wrong address.

Donald Trump has never let the truth get in the way of his quest for power and money. So it’s up to us to stand up to his lies and scare tactics ourselves. We have to make sure everyone knows voting by mail is common, safe and fair, and we have to push our local leaders to better prepare for an election under a pandemic.

If we don’t fight for vote-by-mail now, we may not be able to safely exercise our rights in November. In a country founded on the noble ideal of a government of, by and for the people, that’s simply unacceptable. Nevertheless, that is exactly what our current president would prefer. It’s up to us to stand up for our right to vote and then use that right to stand up for more honorable and capable American leadership.

-Mike Ongstad Communications Director Stand Up Republic