Trump Attacks Mail Voting With New Set Of False Claims | Donald Trump

Donald Trump launched a new attack on Monday by mail, making a series of false accusations to suggest that the 2020 elections will be tainted by fraud.

The president has been making false claims about voting by mail for months, fueling concerns that he is laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2020 election.

On Monday, he presented a new theory, claiming that foreign countries would print millions of ballots by mail and send them to voters.

The idea was previously presented by United States Attorney General William Barr earlier this month and repeated by the attorney general in a television interview on Sunday.

Trump made the claims after reports that he was furious after a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where attendance was far below what his campaign had projected. Trump told the Politico news site last week that expanding the vote by mail was his “biggest risk” while seeking reelection.

Experts have said that it would be almost impossible for a foreign country to orchestrate the type of fraud that Trump and Barr are promoting.

Many electoral offices have systems to closely track ballots by mail and have other methods of verifying the identity of a voter, such as comparing the signature on the ballot with those on file.

“There are many checks and balances to ensure that no one can print ‘millions’ of ballots and vote for them,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Electoral Research and Innovation, which works with election officials across the country.

“We have decades of experience in applying these security measures, even during World War II, confirming the integrity of voting by mail. That’s why election officials from both parties, including most Republicans, promote voting by mail and vote by mail themselves. “

Different jurisdictions are required to print ballots with different combinations of races and designs, depending on where the voter lives. There may even be specific stocks of paper required for the ballots, all measures that would make it extremely difficult for a foreign power to simply print and mail the ballots.

In Wake County, North Carolina, for example, there are nearly 100 different ballots for voters this fall, depending on where they live, Gerry Cohen, a member of the county board of elections, tweeted. He added that all mail ballots are reviewed in a public meeting by the five members of the county board.

“It is ridiculous. You cannot simply print ballots. There is a specific process with vendors or inmates at election offices. Tracking ballots is one way to add security,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Institute for Home Voting and former Denver election official “If Barr or Trump had visited an electoral office or had advisers who knew the process, they would know that this is not feasible.”

In a separate tweet Monday, Trump pointed to the fact that Americans have voted in wartime to suggest that Covid-19 was simply being used as an excuse to “cheat.” But the military has long voted by mail and there is a long history of expanding access to the ballot because of the war, Alexander Keyssar, a historian who studied the election, told NBC News in April.

Trump has continued to attack mail voting despite the fact that he and other members of his administration have used it frequently. On Monday, Business Insider reported that Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen voted in the Indiana primaries this month using the Indiana Governor’s Mansion as their address. Pence had done the same in 2018.

The Indiana constitution says someone does not lose their residence if called out of state by the federal service, said Ian Hauer, spokesman for Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson. A Pence spokesperson tweeted that the governor’s mansion remained the correct legal address for Pences to vote absentee.