President Donald Trump is continuing to cry out that expanded mail-in voting will lead to a “rigged” election in November.
“This whole thing with this mail-in ballot, that’s a rigged election waiting to happen,” the president said during an interview on Fox News “Hannity” Tuesday evening.
He continued, “It’s rigged, and everyone knows it because you can’t send out 60 million mail-in ballots to everybody in the… who knows who’s getting them?”
Trump then went on to answer his own question about “who knows who’s getting them.” He said the mailmen will get the ballots and suggested “people are going to just grab batches of them.”
“And you talk about China and Russia. They will be grabbing plenty of them,” Trump said. “It’s a disaster. It’s a rigged election waiting to happen.”
However, the president then said that “an absentee ballot is OK, where you send in for a ballot, they go through a process, and they send it to you, and then you send it.”
“But these mail-in ballots, where they send millions of them all over the country, it’s going to be a rigged election. And this country shouldn’t allow it. The courts have to step in. We are in many different courts right now. If the courts don’t step in, the federal courts, you will never know who won the election.”
See Trump’s remarks (starting at 6:35):
Trump’s criticism of mail-in ballots is not new. He has repeatedly slammed expanded mail-in voting, as he previously claimed they would be “rigged.”
“There’s been tremendous corruption, tremendous corruption, on mail-in ballots. So absentee ballot great. Mail-in ballot absolutely no good,” he said on July 15th.
There is no evidence to back up the president’s claims that expanded mail-in voting will cause widespread fraud.
The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) commissioner, Ellen Weintraub, however, did warn on August 10 that the results of the presidential election likely could not be known on the night of the election, as IJR reported.
“Let me just tell everybody, we’re all going to need to take a deep breath and be patient this year because there’s a substantial chance we are not going to know on election night what the results are,” Weintraub said during a CNN interview.
She said it is due to the possibility of a high increase of mail-in ballot amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“If it takes a little bit longer to count all the votes accurately, that’s what we need to do in order to ensure that everyone’s vote counts,” the FEC commissioner said.