Former President Barack Obama slammed President Donald Trump in an interview released Friday for “trying to cut the postal service” to vote on mail in the 2020 election and urged lawmakers and citizens to take action for “integrity” to protect “from the elections.
Obama spoke on the podcast of his former campaign manager David Plouffe, and responded to recent comments from Trump, who said earlier this week that holding emergency funds for the U.S. Postal Service would prevent the post office from “taking everything from these millions and millions of ballots. ”
Obama responded to those remarks, accusing Republicans of trying for years to “discourage people’s voting in all sorts of ways,” such as voter identification and rhyme-mongering laws, but said Trump’s threats “were unique to modern history.”
“What we have never seen before is a president saying, ‘I will try to actively kneel the Postal Service to vote, and I will be explicit about why I do it.’ That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it? “Obama said.” And we did not hold an election in the midst of a pandemic that is still deadly and is killing many people.
‘So in that case, the thing I’m most worried about is … how do we protect the integrity of the election process? How do we ensure that the votes of people are counted? How do we police and control how state officials set up polling stations and make sure every vote is counted? he went on.
Trump has so far opposed Congress ‘efforts to add billions of dollars to the Post Service’s budget to help fund the extra work needed to process more votes by mail as a result of’ the coronavirus pandemic – although he later suggested he would not veto such funding if it were part of the next coronavirus relief package.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail-in-voting, used in the United States since the Civil War, invites fraud and has advocated for personal suffrage. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States, according to numerous surveys and surveys.
In June, a major Trump donor, Louis DeJoy, was installed as postmaster general, and earlier this month he announced a major shakeup of the service’s top leadership.
And earlier this summer, Trump’s presidential campaign called for blocking Nevada’s expanded post-in-time plans.
