Bentz on vote by mail: Keep it; it's dangerous.

Here is how to do two opposite things at once. 

U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz (R- OR) says he doesn't want to ban mail voting. Then he tells us how bad it is.

Read the headline, then watch the news clip. It's just 60 seconds. 

Click here

He was asked if he favored ending mail-in voting. He took exactly one second to say "I'm not." 

Then he spent 39 seconds saying what was wrong with it.  Here is what he said:

I’m not. I think mail-in voting does result in a lot more people actually voting, but it doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It’s not even close. I brought a bill years ago when I was in the Oregon legislature to ban ballot harvesting, and that’s just one of the problems with mail-in ballots. The other problem is many times ballots are sent to houses that no longer have the occupants previously there, and who knows who’s actually voting. There’s a signature identification requirement, and I think county clerks are doing a great job trying to apply it, but it’s not perfect by any stretch. But more people vote.

Strange headline. Did the person who wrote the headline actually watch the clip? 

About 97 percent of his statement repeated Trump talking points that mail-in voting is prone to fraud. It was skillful political sleight of hand on Bentz's part: a single second to get himself a lucky headline from KOBI to please Oregon voters who overwhelmingly favor our voting system, but news clip content that reverses course 180 degrees to be compliant with Trump and MAGA. 

Early this year I talked with Tobias Read, Oregon's secretary of state, the state's highest election official, suggesting he identify a few of the most flagrant cases of voter fraud and refer the incidents to a district attorney for prosecution. I suggested, "Let Oregonians see that people who commit voter fraud spent serious time in prison."

He said he couldn't because voter fraud is very, very rare in Oregon and there aren't cases to prosecute.

I am not going to complain about KOBI's odd headline. I cut its news department some slack. KOBI is a locally-owned TV station, one that still has a substantial news department at a time when most other local news operations are cutting back and shutting down. At least KOBI is trying and they covered the story. But Bentz is not being straight with the public on the voting issue, because on this issue, as with others, he cannot get crossways with Trump.

Yesterday I wrote that Bentz's district office staff was stonewalling constituents who were trying to learn his position on vote by mail. I quoted the run-around I got. Instead of reading a statement from Bentz, the staff sent me to a dead-end website. Several people have written me saying that they, too, called his local office and got the same non-answer. I consider this unacceptable and unworthy of the job of representation.

Does this news clip resolve the question of whether Bentz supports Oregon's vote by mail? Not really. I would characterized his words this way: He doesn't join Trump in trying to ban mail-in voting, but delivers Trump's central message that its a bad system that lets fraudulent votes be counted. 

He gets to have it both ways, or neither way. 

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