Trump Pauses Attacks on Vote-by-Mail to Praise Florida’s System
Trump Pauses Attacks on Vote-by-Mail to Praise Florida’s System
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday paused his attacks on mail-in voting to unequivocally tout it for his adopted home state of Florida, where Democrats have outpaced Republicans in seeking absentee ballots and where his rival Joe Biden is leading in some polls.
After months of claiming without evidence that vote-by-mail is rife with fraud, Trump took to Twitter to argue that the state’s system is “Safe and Secure.”
“In Florida, I encourage all to request a Ballot and Vote by Mail!” he wrote.
At a news conference at the White House on Tuesday evening, Trump said he had “total confidence” in Florida because the state has a “great Republican governor.” He went on to praise Governor Ron DeSantis and his predecessor, Republican Rick Scott, who is now a senator.
“Florida has been working on this for years and they have a very good system of mail-in and that would be absentee or even beyond absentee,” Trump said. “We have total confidence that if you mail in your ballots in Florida it’s going to matter.”
Polls show a growing skepticism of vote-by-mail among Republicans, and in several key states, including Florida, more Democrats than Republicans have requested to vote absentee in November.
Biden is leading Trump in Florida by a little over 6 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
With vote-by-mail rates expected to surge to historic levels due to concerns about contracting the coronavirus at a polling place, Trump has repeatedly disparaged the practice, arguing it will lead to massive fraud that experts say would be near-impossible to pull off.
Trump also argues that mail-in voting primarily benefits Democrats.
On Monday, he said that legislation in Nevada to expand mail-in voting was an “illegal late night coup” that “made it impossible for Republicans to win the state.”
“In the case of Nevada, they are going to be voting in a matter of weeks. You can’t do that. I can’t imagine the post office could do it, all of a sudden it’s supposed to dealing in millions of ballots,” Trump said Tuesday at the White House.
Elections officials and experts on vote-by-mail say there is no evidence to back up the president’s assertions and his criticism has complicated long-running Republican efforts to encourage early voting.
Trump’s most recent tweet also undermined one of the distinctions that he and other members of his administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, have sought to make between “absentee” and “mail-in voting.”
Although terminology differs from state to state, elections officials now generally refer to “mail-in voting” since most voters who use it are no longer required to be “absent” from the state on Election Day. Mail-in voting is subject to the same verification procedures in each state as absentee voting, which range from matching signatures on the ballot envelope to those on file to requiring a copy of a state-issued ID be included or even having the ballot notarized.
Last week, Trump went even further with his attacks on vote-by-mail, raising the question of whether the election should be postponed while the process is improved, a suggestion roundly rejected by lawmakers from both parties.
Trump has repeatedly alleged that mail-in ballots are routinely stolen from mailboxes, fraudulently filed and “rigged” by unknown forces. He’s raised the specter of foreign governments counterfeiting ballots to influence the election and undocumented immigrants voting illegally en masse.
Elections officials and experts on vote-by-mail say there is no evidence to back up these claims. Oregon, which has voted entirely by mail since 2000, has documented only about a dozen cases of fraud, and a comprehensive study from Stanford University released this spring found no advantage in vote-by-mail to either Democrats or Republicans.
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