White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who has vehemently defended President Trump’s baseless tirade against mail-in voting initiatives, reportedly voted by mail repeatedly in the past decade.
McEnany cast an absentee ballot in every Florida election she participated in since 2010, according to a Tampa Bay Times report on Wednesday. Much like President Trump, McEnany most recently voted by mail during Florida’s 2020 presidential primary.
When asked for comment about her vote-by-mail-history, McEnany said in a statement shared with TPM on Wednesday that absentee voting “has the word absent in it for a reason.”
“It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person,” McEnany said, before doubling down on the President’s recent assertions that mail-in voting initiatives are part of a “Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus,” lead to voter fraud and is “a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh defended McEnany’s absentee voting history in a Wednesday afternoon tweet.
This conflates absentee-by-mail with mail-every-registered-voter-a-ballot.
They are not the same thing at all. https://t.co/khblW10PoN
— Tim Murtaugh – Download the Trump 2020 app today! (@TimMurtaugh) May 27, 2020
McEnany’s own voting record came under scrutiny as the President continues to assert an unfounded claim that voting-by-mail leads to voter fraud. During a White House briefing last week, McEnany said that Trump — who officially changed his residence to Florida late last year — votes by mail because “the President is, after all, the President, which means he’s here in Washington.”
Shortly after Twitter attached a “get the facts” disclaimer to Trump’s false tweets about voting by mail on Tuesday afternoon, McEnany bolstered the President’s war against mail-in-voting in a tweet thread.
? Get the facts about mail-in ballots!
Will the media, and @Twitter, acknowledge these real concerns with mass mail-in voting?
THREAD ⬇️
— Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) May 26, 2020
