President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have requested mailing and received votes for next week’s primary elections in Florida.
CNN host Ana Cabrera report at the post-voting polling station hours after the president made public the reason for his opposition to additional election funding for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for the purpose of sabotaging plans to expand voting by mail.
“They need that money to run the Post Office so it can take all those millions of ballots,” he said. Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. “If they do not receive those two items, that means you can not have universal mail-in-vote. Because they are not provided.”
The developments come amid reports that Trump met with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for a “congratulatory meeting” at the White House last week.
According to Cabrera, records with the Palm Beach County election supervisor show that Trumps votes were handed over to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday, where the president explained last November what could be a violation of ‘ the federal election law.
Trump, who considers Florida a critical swing state, cited “tax goals” as the primary reason he had changed his place of residence in New York. He cast a mail-in vote during the Florida presidency in March, even though he ran at least six times in person through a polling station.
“It’s illegal,” Reginald Stambaugh, a Palm Beach County attorney involved in a dispute over a dock the president has been trying to set up at Mar-a-Lago in recent months, HuffPost reported in June.
According to that report, Trump tried to vote as Floridian last fall while taking 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. as claimed his stay. Election officials in Palm Beach County, however, rejected the registration attempt because the White House was not located in the county.
Trump later submitted a new registration listing his residence at Mar-a-Lago, confirming with a signature that it was true. (“I live in Manhattan,” Trump told officials in a conference call just the week before.)
However, in 1993, Trump reached an agreement with the city of Palm Beach, allowing him to redevelop his estate Mar-a-Lago into a club, in exchange for his promise to never live there, The Washington Post reported in May.
Florida law prevents residents from registering to vote for a place of business. The law further states that registered voters must be “Florida residents,” and residents must provide either a state-issued driver’s license or an identity card, according to the state’s online registration portal. (It is unclear whether the president owned any of them, and the White House did not respond to Salon’s questions about the case.)
The president has spent months, without proving, claiming that post-in-ballots invite widespread fraud and election interference. He changed his tune last week, but only in the case of his newly declared home state, whose systems he claimed in a tweet were somehow uniquely “safe and secure.”
“Whether you call it a Vote by Post or an Absentee Voting, in Florida the Electoral System is Safe and Secure, Probe and True. The Florida Voting System has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats trying to change it), so in Florida I encourage everyone to request a vote and vote by mail! #MAGA, “said the President.
Florida is represented by a governor and two U.S. senators from Trump’s Republican Party.
