Credit Donald Trump with this much: When he finds a riff, he sticks with it.
For the better part of four years now, despite an utter paucity of evidence, the nation’s 45th president has claimed that our electoral system is so rife with voter fraud results cannot be trusted.
The opening salvo came in 2016 when Trump claimed that between 3 million and 5 million votes were illegally cast.
The former number, by the way, represents Hillary Clinton’s victorious margin in the popular vote. But we’re sure that was sheer coincidence. In 2018, a specially convened presidential commission found no evidence of any wrongdoing, an outcome that proved more speed bump than unscalable barrier to future fraud claims.
“Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them,” Trump thundered in a June 28 Tweet. “Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election is USA history. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins.”
Trump’s claims about mail-in balloting are “wrong and if used to prevent states from taking the steps needed to ensure public safety during November’s election, they will be deadly wrong. Mail ballot fraud is incredibly rare, and legitimate security concerns can be easily addressed,” the Brennan Center at New York University wrote in an April 10 analysis.