Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

In DNC speech, Cortez Masto stands firm against Trump on mail-in voting

Democratic National Convention, Day 1

AP

Sen, Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., speaks during the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday, Aug. 17, 2020. (screenshot from livestream)

In a virtual appearance at the Democratic National Convention, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was tenacious when addressing President Donald Trump’s attacks on plans for the general election to be conducted in Nevada mostly through mail-in balloting out of safety concerns over the pandemic.

“Mr. President: Nevada is not intimidated by you. America is not intimidated by you,” she said.

Cortez Masto spoke almost an hour and a half into the convention, conducted virtually because of the coronavirus crisis. Her criticism of the president’s attacks on mail-in voting come after the Trump campaign sued Nevada to stop the state from mailing ballots to all active voters in the November election.

During the most recent special legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill that would automatically send out mail ballots to active voters while keeping a set number of in-person voting locations active in each county.

Democratic National Convention 2020

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention, Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020, at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Launch slideshow »

“Despite what the president says, voting by mail has been a secure, proven option for decades. In 2016, 33 million Americans voted by mail. Even Donald Trump has requested an absentee ballot twice this year,” Cortez Masto said.

She called the campaign’s lawsuit, filed soon after the bill’s passage, “meritless” and drew attention to the fact that Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegasvke has asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed.

“Donald Trump is trying to divide us by undermining that right,” Cortez Masto said. “He has threatened to withhold federal funding to Nevada because of our vote-by-mail system. That is funding our schools and seniors rely on.”

The convention is bringing together supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden, who will accept the party’s nomination during the convention. These supporters ranged from Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran for the party’s nomination on a progressive platform, to former Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who ran for the 2016 Republican nomination against Trump. It was emblematic of the party’s wide-ranging push for support leading up to the election.

Sanders has unleashed a scathing attack on Trump, suggesting that under him “authoritarianism has taken root in our country.”

The Vermont senator said Trump had proved incapable of controlling the coronavirus outbreak, coping with the economic fallout and addressing institutional racism in the United States and climate change threatening the globe.

“Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” Sanders said. “Trump golfs.”

Sanders, who finished second in the Democratic primary behind Biden, struck a more optimistic tone when he thanked supporters who voted for him in 2016 and 2020 for helping to move the country “in a bold, new direction.”

He called on his backers, as well as those who supported other 2020 Democratic primary contenders or Trump four years ago, to unite behind Biden.

Sanders said, “My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”

Michelle Obama warned Americans to “vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it” during her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

In remarks that capped off Monday night’s event, she offered a sharp rebuke of the Trump presidency, telling viewers that he “has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment,” she said.

She added that “if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can.” Obama emphasized the need for all Americans to vote, making reference to the voters who stayed home in 2016 and helped deliver Donald Trump the win that year, even as he lost the popular vote.

She says, “We’ve all been suffering the consequences.”

Nevada Democrats held the first of four nightly pre-watch events with a lineup including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Rep. Dina Titus, Assemblyman William McCurdy II, and state Attorney General Aaron Ford.

Reid, long considered the godfather of the state party, has been an outspoken critic of Trump during his time in office. In his appearance at the virtual event, he denounced Trump, drawing attention to the president’s response to the ongoing pandemic and his attacks on the postal service. 

“He’ll go down in history as the worst president in the history of this country, and that’s saying a lot,” Reid said.

Titus, whose district makes up much of Las Vegas proper and the Las Vegas Strip, said Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and others are trying to “subvert the system.” She said that Trump wants to stop mail-in voting measures because he thinks it will hurt his reelection chances.

“He’s not really afraid of voter fraud, he’s afraid of voter turnout,” she said.

Titus said Trump would attempt to put the results into doubt if there wasn’t a large margin of votes.

After the 2016 election, in which Trump lost the popular vote, he made claims that he only did so because millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally, which is untrue. There was no widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.

“We can’t just squeak it by, we can’t just pull him across the line, we’ve got to win big and I feel like we’re going to,” Titus said.

Ford drew attention to what he called Trump’s history of racism. Ford said Trump hasn’t apologized for calling for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five, five youth who were falsely convicted of raping a female jogger in New York City’s Central Park.

Ford also brought up Trump’s comment on the white supremacist, neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Trump, in remarks made after the incident, said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Ford also criticized Trump’s recent tweet that people living the “suburban lifestyle dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood,” which he called a racist dog whistle to “suburban housewives.”

“From the beginning to the pinnacle of his successes, he’s perpetuated prejudice and induced inequities, and in today’s election, the contrast can’t be clearer,” Ford said.

 The Associated Press contributed to this report.