Donald Trump has begun warning that the November election will be “rigged” as his numbers collapses in national polls.
President Barack Obama said Thursday during a press conference that Trump doesn’t know what he is talking about.
“What does that mean?” Obama said. “The federal government doesn’t run the election process. States and cities and communities all across the country, they are the ones who set up the voting systems and the voting booths. And if Mr. Trump is suggesting that there is a conspiracy theory that is being propagated, across the country, included in places like Texas, where typically it’s not Democrats who are in charge of voting booths, that’s ridiculous.”
Obama did say that he took cyber attacks on America’s voting system and any attempt to intervene in the voting process seriously, but that assuming an election is going to be “rigged” is wrong.
“If we see signs that a voting machine or a system is vulnerable it hacking, then we inform those local authority who are running the elections that they need to be careful. If we see jurisdictions that are violating federal laws, in terms of equal access and aren’t providing ramps for disabled voters, or are discriminating in some fashion or are otherwise violating civil rights laws, then the Justice Department will come in and take care of that,” Obama said. “But this will be an election like every other election. And I think all of us at some points in our lives have played sports or maybe just played in a school yard or sand box and sometimes folks if they lose, they complain they got cheated. “
Trump claimed earlier this week that voter fraud could be rampant in the November election even though repeated studies have shown it to be extremely rare.
“If the election is rigged, I would not be surprised,” he told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.”
Obama said that he has actually never “heard of somebody complaining about being cheated before the game was over. Or before the score is even tallied.”
“You know, go out there and try to win the election,” Obama said. “If Mr. Trump is up 10 or 15 points on election day and ends up losing, then maybe he can raise some questions. That doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.”
