White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is trying to put to rest the idea that President Donald Trump will try to delay the November 3 general election.
During an appearance on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Meadows was asked if Trump seriously considered delaying the election.
“All of this that we’re talking about comes down to one thing,” Meadows said. “Universal mail-in ballots. That is not a good idea for the country. We don’t have to look any further than New York to see what a debacle mail-in ballots have been, when we have weeks and weeks of delay of who the winner is. Can you imagine if that is with the President of the United States?”
When asked to clarify when Trump had explored the idea of a delay, Meadows said, “He has not looked at delaying any election.”
However, Meadows argued that the country would see a delay if states vastly expand mail-in ballots because he argued states are “not equipped to handle” processing and counting hundreds of thousands or millions of mail-in ballots.
Watch the video below:
ELECTION DELAYS: @MarkMeadows says it's "Not a good idea for the country" to have #mailinballots but is confident "We’re going to hold an election on November 3."
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) August 2, 2020
Adds, “and the president is going to win.” pic.twitter.com/c2BG9oejrW
When asked if it was responsible for the president to suggest delaying the election, Meadows said of Trump’s tweet, “Well it was a question mark.”
“It is responsible for him to say that if we try to go to 100% universal mail-in ballots will we have an election result on November 3? No, I would suggest that we wouldn’t even have it on January 3. And so we’ve got to make sure that we do this in a proper way where we promote absentee ballots. We make sure that a ballot goes from an individual to the ballot box without someone else having the ability to conduct a fraudulent effort.”
Meadows referred to the primary election for New York’s 12th Congressional District, where the number of mail-in ballots cast was 17.5 times higher than previous elections.
Additionally, between 19% and 28% of the ballots cast were invalidated. In that election, the winner has yet to be decided.
Trump has previously said that he does not want to delay the election date. However, he raised concern that increasing access to mail-in ballots would delay the time to declare the winner of the presidential election, as IJR reported.
“You won’t know the election result for weeks, months, maybe years after,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.
He also raised concerns that increasing access to mail-in ballots would lead to massive fraud and raise questions about the outcome of the election. “Maybe you’ll never know the election results, and that’s what I’m concerned with. It’ll be fixed. It’ll be rigged. This will be catastrophic for our nation.”
Despite Trump’s claim that mail-in ballots would lead to massive fraud, several studies have no found evidence to support it.
However, as with the New York primary election, there are concerns that state officials will struggle to count all the ballots, and that delays with the postal service will lead to thousands of ballots being invalidated because they arrived after the deadline.
A recent NPR study found that in the elections held in 2020 so far, roughly 65,000 mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived after the deadline.
The issue of delaying the election exploded on Thursday after Trump appeared to suggest delaying the election, as IJR reported.
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
However, speaking to reporters during a press conference, Trump said, “Do I want to see a date change? No.”
