Joseph Sabino Mistick: 'Shoeless Joe,' Trump and cheating outrage

When “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was indicted for fixing the 1919 World Series, it rocked the nation. Jackson was a star player for the Chicago White Sox, a great hitter in his prime when he was accused of conspiring to throw the series to the Cincinnati Reds for $5,000.

“Shoeless Joe” was acquitted at trial, even after confessing guilt to a grand jury. But that confession was enough for baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to bar the outfielder from the game for life. Even though the stakes are relatively low in sport — nobody dies from this — Americans are outraged at cheating in sports.

Sadly, it’s not always that way with elections. The big cheaters steal votes in massive numbers and in full view — closing polls, shortening hours, purging minority voters — often in the name of good government. These are all voter suppression tactics, and we are seeing some new ones in this presidential election.

Voter suppression is based on a simple proposition: If you can keep all those voters who are unlikely to vote for you from casting ballots, you will win. And if you can’t stop them from voting, because they can now vote by mail, you have to find a way to keep their votes from being counted.

Donald Trump hates mail-in voting, except when he votes by mail. And he says that mail-in voting is fine in Florida, where he expects to win. But in those states where he thinks he could be losing, he wants to stop mail-in voting. He sounds like a man who is afraid of something.

Trump tweeted on July 30, “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 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???”

Five states — Utah, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington —use automatic mail-in ballots nearly exclusively. And at least 35 states have revised or adopted mail-in ballot systems in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In Pennsylvania, before the pandemic, the Republican-controlled Legislature adopted no-excuse mail-in voting as part of an election reform bill that was supported by the Democratic governor. It was a bipartisan package aimed at increasing voter turnout while eliminating the hurdles that can accompany in-person voting.

Once Trump realized he couldn’t stop mail-in voting, he looked for ways to keep those votes from being counted. Blocking funding for the United States Postal Service would slow the mail and keep many ballots from arriving in time to be counted, as he explained to Fox Business News.

“Now they need that money in order to have the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. … But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it,” he said.

In some circles, this may not get the same outraged response as an under-inflated football or stolen signs from a baseball dugout. But think of poor “Shoeless Joe,” whose cheating was nothing compared to this, and he was barred from the game for life.