Although President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have post-in-votes this week at the Florida Primary Congress from New Jersey, their votes were presumably handed down by an individual who nominated the pair to cast the ballots on to pick up and drop off at their Palm Beach area.
The timeline of events raises questions about the chain of oversight over those ballots, and whether it meets state requirements.
According to CNN and The Washington Post reports citing Palm Beach County election officials, Trumps votes were returned Monday – ahead of the deadline. Florida law allows registered voters to sign a confirmation authorizing an intermediary to pick up and drop off their postal ballots.
That confirmation is specifically titled, “Meaning of Voting by Post-Vote for a Voter.” It is required for each individual election – and also requires the designated passage to provide photo ID.
The Trumps have reportedly signed the confirmations and raised their votes last week. While the deadline was for submitted ballot requests to be sent, voters were still in person to pick up ballots or have a recipient pick them up.
The Trumps appointed Alex Garcia, a member of the Florida Republican Party, to raise and drop their votes, according to both CNN and The Post. Message told Garcia the same service when the first family sent out post-in ballots in March.
Ashley Houlihan, a lawyer for the supervisor’s office, told The Post that the completed ballots arrived Monday.
“The president and first lady had just entered her pointer and picked up her vote at the office,” Houlihan told the outlet. “Many of our voters do the same thing when they miss the deadline for sending the email to send to them. Or in some cases we have so many snowstorms, and they are not sure on where to stay; so it’s just easier for them to come in and request their vote by e-mail at the office. “
According to CNN host Ana Cabrera, however, records with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections showed that Trumps votes were delivered to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. But the Trumps have stayed at the family club in Bedminster, NJ since the weekend before
It remains unclear whether Garcia – who, according to the terms of the confirmation, must have picked up the personal votes from the area – delivered the votes to Mar-a-Lago himself. Further unclear is the chain of custody to and from Bedminster.
The delivery method to Bedminster – courier or post – is not a small detail, as the president has been rails for months against mail-in ballots, falsely claiming that the practice is vulnerable to mass fraud. It is also unclear whether it would be a violation of Florida law to have anyone other than the designated interpersonal votes. State and county election officials in Florida did not respond to Salon’s requests for comment.
The president announced his stay in Florida last November – and may have violated federal election law in the process.
Trump, who considers Florida a critical swing state, cited “tax goals” as the primary reason he had changed his place of residence from New York. He cast a mail-in ballot during the Florida presidency in March, even though he ran at least six times in person through a polling station.
Reginald Stambaugh, a Palm Beach County attorney involved in a dispute over a dock the president has been trying to set up near Mar-a-Lago in recent months, told HuffPost in June that the move was “illegal.”
According to that report, Trump had tried to register as a Floridian last fall while building 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington as his place of residence claimed. Election officials in Palm Beach County refused to seek registration, citing the fact that the White House was not located in the county.
Trump then resubmitted, citing his whereabouts at Mar-a-Lago and confirming with a signature that it was true. (“I live in Manhattan,” Trump told U.S. officials in a conference call the week before.)
However, Trump had reached an agreement with the city of Palm Beach in 1993 that would allow him to repay his property Mar-a-Lago as a club, as long as he promised never to live there, The Washington Post reported in May. Registered voters in the state must also be residents of Florida, and state law prevents residents from registering to vote for a corporate property.
Despite sending out e-mails, the president has spent months making baseless claims about voting by mail as an ideal tool for electoral fraud. However, data show otherwise.
An MIT analysis of the Conservative Heritage Foundation’s database on election fraud in the US found that in the last 20 years only 143 post-fraud cases – out of 204 absent cases, even a fraction of 1,200 fraud -cases of any kind – ended with criminal convictions. On average, these are seven to eight cases a year nationwide – as about 0.00006% of the total number of votes cast.
However, the president makes one exception: his new Republican-led home state, whose systems he claimed in a tweet from early August, without giving details, are 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.
