EDITORIAL: Save the date? President Trump wants to change it

Gov. Steve Sisolak will call a second special session of the Legislature once he herds all the cats into the traveling crate. One of the topics is likely to be the procedures for the November election.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has his own thoughts on the balloting. Not surprisingly, he shared them on social media Thursday morning. “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good,” he tweeted, “2020 will be the most INACCURATE &FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

As with many of the president’s impulsive outbursts, it’s hard to know whether to take this fusillade seriously or whether to treat it as just another effort by the man in the Oval Office to troll the gullible Resistance. It’s worth noting that Mr. Trump’s post came near the announcement that the economy had taken the biggest one-quarter hit in U.S. history thanks to the coronavirus. Can you say “distraction”?

But it’s not the first time Mr. Trump has floated the idea of postponing the 2020 election, so perhaps the silly notion needs to be shot down as quickly as possible.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to postpone the November balloting. Yes, there are legitimate concerns about security in jurisdictions that plan to conduct the election primarily via mail. So-called vote-harvesting schemes are an affront to the secret ballot and are an invitation for shenanigans. If Nevada lawmakers give a whit about public confidence in the election, they’ll quash any attempt to allow special-interest groups to collect and return ballots en masse.

That being said, there’s no evidence that mail-in voting with reasonable safeguards will result in massive fraud, as some allege. Pockets of problems have indeed occurred, but they can be addressed through wise precautions. During a worldwide pandemic, it makes sense to expand opportunities for those who are uncomfortable heading to the polls. The prevailing goal must ultimately be balancing the competing interests of voter convenience against the integrity of the process.

In the end, Mr. Trump has virtually no power in this regard anyway. “Election dates are set by the U.S. Constitution, by Congress and by the states — the president has literally no authority over it,” Reason magazine’s Eric Boehm noted this week. Given there’s absolutely no chance a split Congress could ever reach agreement on altering the Nov. 3 election date, any debate is theoretical rather than practical.

Bottom line: President Trump’s election focus should be directed less on worrying about the date and more toward articulating a market-oriented second-term agenda while highlighting the dangers of a radical left takeover of Congress and the White House.