President Donald Trump is proposing a "delay" in November's presidential election, as he continues to float unfounded claims that mail-in voting is linked with fraud.
The president tweeted “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
July 30, 2020 Federal elections are set by the Congress and the Constitution has no provisions for a delay to the January 20, 2021, presidential inauguration.
The Trump campaign released a statement regarding the president's tweet about delaying the election via CBS News.
Hogan Gidley, Trump 2020 National Press Secretary: "The President is just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting. They are using coronavirus as their means to try to institute universal mail-in voting, which means sending every registered voter a ballot whether they asked for one or not. Voter rolls are notoriously full of bad addresses for people who have moved, are non-citizens, or are even deceased. Universal mail-in voting invites chaos and severe delays in results, as proven by the New York Congressional primary where we still don't know who won after more than a month."
Check out this Mail-In Voting experiment by a local news station! pic.twitter.com/23tOdt1hYc
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
July 29, 2020 There is no evidence of voter fraud through mail-in voting, even in states with all-mail votes.
But several GOP state officials are forging ahead to do just that, undermining one of Trump’s arguments about how elections should be conducted amid the coronavirus outbreak.
While Trump has complained that voting by mail is “ripe for fraud," Republican state officials in Iowa, Ohio and West Virginia have all taken steps to ease access to mail-in ballots, following health officials’ warnings that voting in person can risk transmission of the deadly virus. The Nebraska's Republican governor urged voters to apply for absentee ballots. Florida's GOP chairman says the party will continue to run a robust vote-by-mail program.
