President Trump is continuing his crusade against statewide voting-by-mail, a program many states are working to expand for the November general election to make voting safer as the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a Tuesday morning tweet, Trump baselessly implied that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) executive order earlier this month — which allows the state’s county elections officials to send registered voters mail-in ballots ahead of the general election — will lead to voter fraud.
….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020
Trump’s latest tirade against mail-in voting initiatives, which was similar to his reaction to Newsom’s executive order announcement earlier this month, comes just days after the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against California’s efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus ahead of the general election.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel accused Newsom of attempting to “redesign our entire election system” through his mail-in voting initiative in a Sunday evening tweet.
I am pleased to announce that the RNC, @NRCC & @CAGOP just sued Gavin Newsom over his illegal election power grab.
His radical plan is a recipe for disaster that would create more opportunities for fraud & destroy the confidence Californians deserve to have in their elections.
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 24, 2020
Make no mistake, Democrats are trying to use this pandemic to redesign our entire election system for political gain, and we will not let their brazen attempts go unchallenged.
Go to https://t.co/ImFKSGulau and help us fight back!
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) May 24, 2020
The President’s Tuesday tweet also comes a week after he threw a fit over mail-in voting initiatives advanced by the governors of Michigan and Nevada. Shortly after falsely accusing Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of sending voters absentee ballots — which he later clarified were actually just mail-in voting applications — Trump went on to make a virtually identical threat against Nevada for sending mail-in ballots to voters ahead of its June primary elections.
Trump is going to recklessly beat and smash the voting process with his sledgehammer - and he doesn’t care if he destroys the system … because that is in fact, his intent.
The more it looks like he is losing the majority of the country - the more he will try to instigate angry mobs who will violently & leathlely disrupt the voting process.
Rather than run on his record, Trump is setting the stage to cast the election results as tainted and not legit. He and the RNC throw a distraction from his poor management of the pandemic rather than own up to 100,000 dead Americans on their watch.
He will leave no stone unturned, either to affect the results or to taint them if he loses. The funny thing is, though, that besides there being virtually no voter fraud* in the US, and that mail-in voting doesn’t tend to affect outcomes (Republican versus Democratic), both red and blue states are pursuing this. Mail-in voting could be one good thing that comes out of this pandemic.
*I heard a statistic that there have been 37 documented cases of voter fraud over the years, covering billions of votes cast.
Trump is being especially cruel and evil today.
After the widower of Lori Klausutis wrote a letter (which was published with consent in the NYT and read with consent on Morning Joe) to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey begging him to remove Trump’s tweets that cruelly slander his deceased wife, Trump decided to tweet some more about Lori’s death.
Trump has also tweeted that if it wasn’t for him and how well he did his job, that we would have lost up to 2 million people to COVID-19. We should be thankful that that only “100,000 plus” will have died.
Trump and the Republicans want to force in-person voting because they know the liberals will stay home just like they did in Wisconsin. Oh…wait.