President Trump, in a tweet late Sunday, said that due to the “process” that voters must follow to obtain an absentee ballot, such a vote is safer than a general vote by mail, and noted a fraud scandal Election in New Jersey. in May as evidence that universal voting by mail would cause widespread problems.
The president’s dispute comes when he and Republicans across the country have resisted Democratic attempts to vote by universal mail in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and after the president and members of his administration were criticized for being hypocritical. for voting absentee while opposing the vote White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has voted by mail 12 times in recent years, CBS reported, and Trump this year voted by mail in Florida, according to CNBC.
“Absentee ballots are fine,” Trump tweeted. “A person has to go through a process to obtain and use them. Voting by mail, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election in the history of the United States. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins. Just watch the Special Election in Patterson, NJ (sic) 19% of the ballots are FRAUD! “
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Trump made a similar comment last week at Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity, when asked about absentee and mail ballots.
“People go through a process for that, but mail ballots send them to anyone and they send them by the millions,” Trump said. “We went through World War I and we voted, we went through World War II and we voted. And now we have a virus, and by then [November] it will be less and less. “
McEnany, originally responding to reports of her absentee voting history, said she had a legitimate reason to vote the way she did because she was traveling, while Democrats are promoting unexcused absentee voting or universal voting. by mail.
“Absentee voting has the floor absent for a reason. It means you are absent from the jurisdiction or cannot vote in person, ”she said in a statement to NBC News. “President Trump is against the Democratic plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass voting by mail without a reason, which has a high propensity for electoral fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media cannot understand. “
From left to right, Paterson Councilman Michael Jackson, Shelim Khalique, Councilman-elect Alex Méndez and Abu Kazyen were charged with charges related to election fraud by the New Jersey Attorney General last week. (New Jersey Attorney General’s Office)
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The president also pointed to a local election scandal in Paterson, NJ, on May 12, which led to charges against four people, including a city councilman and an elected councilor, according to a statement from New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir. Grewal.
While elections were being held by mail for the Paterson City Council, the US Postal Inspection Service told the New Jersey GA office that “hundreds of mail ballots were found in a mailbox in Paterson. They found numerous additional ballots in a mailbox in nearby Haledon. “
Grewal, after an investigation, last week filed election fraud charges against District First Councilman and Council Vice President Michael Jackson and Third District Councilor-Elect Alex Mendez, as well as two other men who were allegedly involved. in electoral fraud.
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“Today’s charges send a clear message: If you try to manipulate an election in New Jersey, we will find you and hold you accountable,” Grewal said. “We will not allow a small number of criminals to undermine public confidence in our democratic process.”
Additionally, 19 percent of the ballots in the election were rejected: NBC 4 New York reported that 16,747 ballots were received by mail in the election, but the county officially counted only 13,557, although it is unclear whether they were fraudulent as Trump claimed.
Democrats and the media have often pointed to the lack of evidence that voting by mail, and voting absentee, lead to electoral fraud. Twitter in the past has even flagged Trump tweets about mail-in election fraud, saying “Trump claimed that mail ballots would lead to ‘a Gifted Election.’ However, fact-checkers say there is no evidence of that mail ballots are related to electoral fraud. “
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“Evidence of general election fraud is extremely rare, and that is also true of absentee voting. In 2016 and 2018, approximately 25 percent of American voters cast ballots by mail,” wrote Trevor Potter of the Law Center for the Campaign in an opinion piece. for Fox News on Sunday. “Justin Levitt, an electoral law expert at the Loyola Law School, reviewed the US elections between 2000 and 2014 and found only 31 cases of electoral fraud in a period when more than a billion votes were cast.”
But there is little precedent for voting by mail on the scale that Democrats propose. Attorney General William Barr on Fox News Sunday said universal or near-universal mail voting would make the US election especially vulnerable.
“When state governments begin to adopt these practices, such as mail ballots, which open the floodgates to possible fraud, people’s confidence in the election result will be undermined,” Barr said. “That could take the country to a very dark place.”
Fox News’ Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
