"The Chaos Is The Point": Chris Coons Sounds Alarm on Trump’s Mail-In Voting Plan

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SPEAKER_5 (1:04)

Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

Michael Smerconish (1:09)

How do you like that?

Chris Coons (1:10)

That's pretty fabulous.

Michael Smerconish (1:12)

United States Senator Chris Coons is in the house and it's his birthday. How old are you?

Chris Coons (1:19)

63

Michael Smerconish (1:20)

63 All right, I'm one ahead of you. I'm one ahead of you.

Chris Coons (1:23)

You're always one step ahead.

Michael Smerconish (1:25)

No, no, no, no, no, no. Welcome to our new digs, by the way.

SPEAKER_5 (1:28)

Thanks, they're fabulous.

Michael Smerconish (1:29)

It's so eager to have you here and so much to discuss, but how are you feeling on your birthday?

Chris Coons (1:34)

Doing okay. Doing okay.

Michael Smerconish (1:36)

What does a birthday mean for Chris Coons? Like, you know, tell me tonight, cake, celebration, you're at home, what goes on?

Chris Coons (1:43)

So I actually celebrated my birthday over the weekend by having crabs down at the beach in Lewis with my wife and go into a Phillies game. Beautiful day, perfect game, except for the last inning, we won't talk about it. This morning calls for my kids, you know, frankly, nothing brings me more joy than hearing, you know, I have a son who was just heading to teach at Largest Catholic Girls High School in Chicago, and he called, and a son who's in medical school, he called, and I know I will hear from my other child when they get up, which will probably be on the other side of this show.

And you know, look, unfortunately, I'm up for re-election, so fortunately, a beloved neighbor is hosting a fundraiser for me tonight, which is something I can't stand about politics. But there will be a lot of people there, family and friends and neighbors.

Michael Smerconish (2:31)

Well, that's great. All right. Happy birthday.

Chris Coons (2:32)

Thank you.

Michael Smerconish (2:33)

Wish you all good things. I will talk about your involvement with Ted Cruz. Very interesting about college sports. But I have something else on my mind. I have an agenda today, particularly in your role as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I think. And it's this initiative by the president regarding the postal service and the mail-in ballots. And the conversation that I'm hearing thus far, I think is focused, not inappropriately so, because it's all very serious, but so much of the conversation has been about him trying to put the postal service in the role of gatekeeper and the bar codes and the envelopes and so forth.

My worry is that they're trying to gin up a citizenship list where there is no such list. You'll pardon me for this, but it's going to be a shit show. Yes. Because there will be people whose names won't appear on it, who should appear on it and vice versa. And there's no way that you can put that together in 60 or 90 days.

That's where the chaos is going to come in. Correct.

Chris Coons (3:38)

Look, first, President Trump recently voted by mail. Our troops vote by mail. Millions of Americans regularly and reliably and securely vote by mail. Less so on the East Coast than the West, but there are many states in the Western United States where a majority of votes are cast by mail.

It is still relatively recent that Delaware has sort of no-fault universal vote by mail, but lots of states, particularly in the West, have long had this. I agree with you that the chaos is the point. Sowing doubt about the reliability of the election, sowing uncertainty about who is voting and why, and Trump continues to take these measures, whether it's trying to push something called the SAVE Act, which is based on a sort of common-sense view. We should make sure only citizens are voting, but it is a solution in search of a problem. There is no evidence that non-citizens are routinely voting. In fact, the few cases there have been over decades.