WASHINGTON – Voting rights experts have sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump’s outrageous claims about the vote-by-mail in Tuesday night’s presidential debate and his refusal to say he would settle for election results.
From claiming that points in West Virginia “sell ballots” to the argument that ballots are “thrown into rivers” and “streams,” Trump intensified his one-year attack on mail-order voting with misleading and conspiratorial statements in his first democratic candidate Debate Joe Biden.
“This is not going to end well,” Trump warned, proceeding with his long series of mail-order attacks, the crusade aimed at questioning the legitimacy of the November election.
Election experts rejected Wednesday.
“What he said was full of inaccuracies and inaccuracies,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the voter remodeling program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York Law School. “Postal ballots are secure. We’ve been voting in one way or another by mail since the Civil War.
“It’s harmful to make those false statements and accusations like that to the election. “
Trump would not refrain from claiming victory until all absentee ballots are counted and warned that he may question the legitimacy of mail ballots before the Supreme Court to resolve the election.
“I’m counting on them to take a look at the ballots, definitely,” Trump said.
Here’s a look at some of Trump’s misleading lies and statements about mail voting:
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Trump said his objection to mail voting involved “unsolicited” mail ballots, adding that they “sent millions of ballots across the country. “
However, in the vast majority of states, adding up to all states on the battlefield, the electorate only has the option to request ballots by mail. This includes Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, the maximum of six states likely for the election.
Millions more people are expected to vote by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic, but only nine states and the District of Columbia hold universal elections by mail, in which ballots are mailed unsolicited to all registered voters without having to request one in advance.
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Five of the states, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Hawaii, planned to hold mail elections even before the pandemic, and only one state, Nevada, is a key state in the presidential race. It will constitute by far the maximum of unsolicited ballots in the United States is California, which Biden is expected to win easily.
When denouncing the vote by mail, Trump said: “There is fraud. They discovered them in streams. They discovered some, who carried Trump’s call the day in a paper basket. “
It turns out Trump is referring to two separate cases from last week, but none is a transparent example of widespread voter fraud.
Fox News reported that three mailing boxes containing postcards were discovered in a ditch, which Trump would possibly have referred to when he said “arroyo,” in Outagamie County, Wisconsin. Mail addressed to the post office and returned to the inspector mail when you discovered. Investigators did not specify whether ballots were sent to the electorate or passed through the electorate.
More: Federal government announces investigation into nine Pennsylvania mail ballots as Trump denounces fraud
Trump’s reference to “paper baskets” stems from the fact that the federal government announced an investigation into nine mail-rejected army ballots recovered from an election in northeastern Pennsylvania County. Seven of the ballots were issued to Trump.
But the FBI said there’s no evidence of a “coordinated” voter fraud campaign.
Norden pointed to several security measures in a position to ensure that ballots sent through an electorate to an electorate succeed in election officials: representatives of either party are guilty of tracking postal ballots; A procedure that exists so that the number of voters who have returned the ballots corresponds to the number counted; and systems that allow the electorate to track their votes after their return.
“These kinds of unfounded accusations are unfounded in reality,” Norden said.
Trump chose West Virginia by saying, “Take a look at West Virginia, the mail that sells the ballots. They sell. They throw themselves into the rivers. It’s a terrible thing for our country. “
The president was referring to a July case in which a postman in Pendleton County, West Virginia, pleaded guilty to postal and voter fraud for turning the political association into five mail order applications, not ballots, from Democrats to Republicans in the state primaries. .
More: West Virginia is guilty of voter fraud after converting Republican voting requests
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, issued a Wednesday providing “clarifications” on the Trump issue, noting that the case did not involve mail voting.
“Voters want to be sure that this election will be safe, safe and fair,” Warner said. “She was a fair example of a committed secretary, who largely followed her electoral procedure and temporarily pointed to an anomaly, as she had been trained to do. . . The formula worked and we were able to temporarily assure the West Virginia electorate that the election was safe. “
Senator Joe Manchin, D-W. Va. , More express in your comments.
“It’s absolutely that President Trump deceives Americans into believing that voter mail fraud is happening in West Virginia,” Manchin said. “There is no widespread voter fraud in West Virginia and any statement to the contrary is false. “
At one point in the debate, Trump said: “I read today that at least 1% of the 2016 ballots were invalidated. They are taking them. We don’t like them. We don’t like them. They throw them awkwardly. Et right. “
The president expresses the number of invalid votes. According to a report by the U. S. Election Assistance Commission, 318,728 mail-in votes, or about 1%, were rejected in the 2016 presidential election.
But there’s no indication that the election rejected the ballots because they “don’t like them. “
The same report found that 27. 5% of votes were rejected by inconsistent signatures; 23% due to missed deadlines; 20% for lack of signatures, among other valid reasons. Each requirement aims to restrict voter fraud.
These are safeguards designed to ensure the authenticity of mail order ballots that led to the rejection of 1% of them in 2016. Rejected ballots are the result of a voter user error and not a fraud.
Trump lamented that some states will allow ballots to be won by mail a few days after the election.
Recent courts in battlefield states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have prolonged voting times by mail.
More: Appeals Court Extension of Wisconsin AbsentEe Voting Deadlines
“Can you believe what they say, “You’ll have to have your survey until November 10th?”On November 10,” Trump said, “It’s seven days after the election, in theory, deserves to have been announced. “
But Trump did not mention that mail-in ballots in all states will have to be postmarked before Election Day and, in many states, days before Election Day. No one will actively vote after it.
In denouncing ballots by “unsolicited” mail, Trump referred to a recent case in which an electorate in a “Democratic region” won two ballots. Turns out he’s talking about Fairfax County, Virginia.
“They sent two to a Democratic zone. They sent a thousand ballots. They all got two ballots. This is going to be a fraud like never before,” Trump said.
Approximately 1,000 voters in Fairfax County, and at least 1,400 electorates in total in Virginia, have won duplicate votes in recent weeks due to a printing problem, the Washington Post reported. Local officials attributed the error to the increased volume of mail-in voting requests. .
But Virginia election officials are under pressure that promises are in a position to ensure that the electorate does not vote twice, including an audit formula that would reject additional voting if someone tried to vote more than once.
Join Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.