Trump insists absentee ballots are fair, but mail voting is corrupt. That’s nonsense.

Throughout the 2020 presidential election, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked voting by mail as prone to fraud (it’s not), he has also taken pains to distinguish between “voting by mail” and “absentee voting.”

Given that Trump himself is voting absentee in 2020, this hair-splitting on his part isn’t exactly shocking. But Trump’s specific claims — that absentee voting and “voting by mail” are somehow different, and that absentee voters “have to go through a whole process” different from that for mail voters — are worth addressing.

The short...