President Trump hates mail-in voting, until he doesn’t
OK, let’s try to get this straight. President Donald Trump doesn’t trust mail-in voting — until he does.
For example, he denounced the very idea of voting by mail as an invitation to commit voter fraud, a bipartisan suspicion, and a problem which he tends to pin solely on Democrats. That’s politics.
But the president changed that tune in the middle of this past week to suggest in a tweet that voting by mail is just dandy — if it is in states that are run by Republican governors.
That would include Florida, the president’s newly adopted home state where he, too, voted by mail in the recent primary election.
“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. “I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!”
Yes, the state known memorably for the “hanging chads” of 2000 and the Supreme Court decision that put George W. Bush in the White House had become the only state where Trump felt confidently could handle mail-in balloting for president.
By midweek, Trump also changed his mind about Arizona, as reports mounted of Republican officials across the country who feared that his unsupported claims of mass voter fraud were discouraging more than Democrats.
After a visit with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, Trump amended his earlier pronouncement to praise mail-in voting in Arizona and bash Nevada. There Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed a bill that made his state the eighth that plans to mail every voter a ballot.
Trump is suing Nevada over the new law, saying in a burst of classic unsupported Trumpian overstatement that it will make it “impossible” for a Republican candidate to win the state.
Trump claimed falsely there “there’s no verification of signatures” in Nevada’s process. Actually, like Arizona, Illinois and most other states, Nevada will continue to check mail-in voters’ signatures against the voters’ signatures on record after the ballot is mailed in.
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