President Donald Trump supports the idea of expanding the number of days people can vote in the November election, while he advocates adding more polling stations to ensure people can socialize well and cast their votes safely.
Trump has repeatedly disrupted nationwide attempts to gain access to mail-in-vote for the November election because the new coronavirus pandemic is spreading across the country very rapidly. He reiterated these concerns in a Monday interview with Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, but said he would support expanding access to polling stations and returning votes on multiple days.
“Would you be open to doing anything other than November 3? Would you be open for November 2? Do you want to be open through the weekend to vote to give people a chance at social distance? Would you support more locations? National Guard work? are you sitting and trying to make some adjustments? ” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked the president during the live phone interview.
“Yes,” Trump replied. “I would support all of this. That’s what you want to do. And people – you know we voted in World War I. We voted in World War II. We voted in many crises. I mean, we voted like that. no one would believe. We never had a problem. Now we have problems, “he said.
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“I would be open to opening more polling stations, where people actually come in and they say, ‘Hey, this is where I live and I live in the state,'” Trump said.
Prior to this question, Trump also suggested that he would be okay with many Americans in sending absent votes if they certified that they were doing so because of concerns about COVID-19.
“Would you support someone who writes in a request for a vote and ‘said my reason: worried about COVID’, would that be something you accept?” Kilmeade asked.
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“I fully support that. That’s called absentee voting Brian. That’s a great thing,” Trump said.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for further comment, but received no response after publication.
The president’s remarks about the election come after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, called these representatives back in session to vote on legislation to support the U.S. Postal Service. The decision came as many in the country expressed concern that the president was trying to undermine the federal agency to suppress votes in November.
“Alarmingly, we see across the nation the devastating effects of the president’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to decipher voters,” Pelosi said in a Sunday letter to House Democrats.
Trump insists Fox & Friends that changes at the Postal Service are meant to run it better and support workers. “I want to make the post office great again,” he said. The president, however, reiterated his complaints about mail-in voting, claiming that expanding access to post-in ballots would lead to widespread voter fraud.
Several Republican and Democratic election officials have repeatedly said that post-in and absent voting is safe and not envious of fraud.
“You will never have an honest election,” Trump said. However, the president later distinguished between post-in-ballots and absentee ballots, which he has used on several occasions and plans to use again in November. Although Trump and many of his supporters have argued that the absence of votes is different from voting for mail-in, election experts have indicated that there is no significant difference between the two.
Many states in the country have early personal voting rights. For example, Arizona allows early personal votes up to 27 days before the election, and ends the Friday prior to election day. California allows this to happen 29 days before the election, but availability varies by province. Michigan allows it even longer, starting 45 days before Nov. 3 with voters filling out an absentee ballot at their polling station.
