Voting by mail to avoid falling victim to a global pandemic? You gotta have a better excuse than that, says President Donald Trump.
Falsely claiming that mail-in voting would lead to “total election fraud,” Trump told reporters Thursday on the White House lawn that only very special exceptions, including one that happens to apply to himself, should allow people to forgo in-person voting and mail their ballots instead.
“If somebody has to mail it in because they’re sick or, by the way, because they live in the White House and they have to vote in Florida and they won’t be in Florida, if there’s a reason for it, that’s okay,” he said, repeating his dubious justification for blatantly contradicting his opposition to mail-in voting systems by voting by mail himself in March. “If there’s a reason.”
“But if there’s not…we don’t want to take any chances with fraud in our elections,” he added.
Trump is waging war against states that have recently made mail-in voting more easily accessible to allow voters avoid putting themselves at risk for COVID-19 by voting in person at poll sites.
After Michigan began sending all its voters applications for mail-in ballots, Trump exploded on Twitter and threatened to pull funding from the state, then threatened to do the same to Nevada for sending its voters mail-in ballots for its June primaries.
Besides peddling the bogus claim that it allows for voter fraud, Trump has attacked mail-in voting in unabashedly partisan terms by urging the GOP to “fight very hard” against voting by mail because it “for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”
Watch Trump below:
Trump argues there's not enough "reason" to allow mail-in voting. pic.twitter.com/CSDMlYcR0b
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) May 21, 2020
