‘When you send out 7.7 million mail-in ballots, there’s forgeries…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from states that expand vote-by-mail systems, arguing that mail-in ballots are riddled with “tremendous fraud.”
On Wednesday, Trump had blasted Michigan and Nevada, two crucial battleground states, for using the current health crisis as a cover to commit vote fraud.
Nevada, which announced that it would hold a mail-in primary election, is creating a “great voter fraud scenario” that will encourage people to “cheat in elections,” Trump said.
And Michigan, which sent absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state, is illegally dragging its state “down this voter fraud path,” he said.
Trump deleted his tweet about Michigan, in which he mistook absentee ballot applications for actual ballots. But he doubled down on his criticism of the vote-by-mail system.
“Mail-in ballots are very dangerous. There is tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality,” he said on Wednesday.
“When you send out 7.7 million mail-in ballots, there’s forgeries,” he continued. “There’s, frankly, duplication where they print ballots on the same kind of paper with the same kind of machinery, and you can’t tell the difference, and then send in thousands and thousands of fake ballots.”
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, whom Trump had attacked in his original tweet, responded to the president’s criticism and said she was “dumbfounded” by it.
“Democratic and Republican secretaries of state are doing just what we’re doing here in Michigan,” Benson told MSNBC, accusing Trump of launching “an effort to misinform and confuse voters about their rights in this state.”
But as Trump has previously noted, the vote-by-mail system is ripe for “fraud”—especially since many states refuse to maintain their already corrupt voter rolls, said Catherine Engelbrecht, president of True the Vote.
These voter rolls are filled with voters who no longer live in the state, voters who aren’t even alive anymore, and voters who aren’t legally registered.
Under the Democrats’ proposed mail-in system, these voter rolls would become extremely problematic, Engelbrecht said.