Trump criticized universal mail-in voting over false allegations of electoral fraud, but supports an absentee vote-by-mail system.
President Donald Trump on repeated occasions through his campaign trail urged voters to not send their ballots via mail —but he also voted by mail in Florida and pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads urging voters to request for absentee ballots. Trump's stance on mail-in voting has been contradictory, according to the New York Times. While he supports voters actively requesting absentee ballots, he has rallied against states automatically mailing ballots to all voters. During campaigning, the president said the mail-in votes would lead to “the greatest rigged election in history.” He also accused the Democrats of “stuffing the ballot boxes with fake and fraudulent votes.” On Oct.10, Trump tweeted, that 50,000 ballots were wrong and fraudulent in Ohio. Despite no evidence, he claimed 50,000 voters received the wrong ballot in the post. In May 2020, Trump stated that the postal vote is dangerous and illegal. Later via a tweet on September 3, the president asked the people to vote twice in November's election. Trump added that the voters should send their postal votes and then go vote on the election day to test the system. He mentioned that if the mail-in ballot system is perfect, as the authorities said, the people wouldn't be able to vote twice. Karen Brinson Bell, executive director for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, reassured voters that numerous measures in place would prevent anyone from getting two votes registered. She further added that voting twice intentionally is a crime. There are provisions in place to prevent people from impersonating voters or stealing ballots, such as authorities checking that ballots have come from voters' registered addresses and requiring signatures on envelopes. The Trump campaign in September clarified that the president opposed “universal mail-in voting systems,” in which states automatically mail ballots to all voters, but supported “traditional absentee vote-by-mail systems,” in which voters must proactively request ballots themselves. Trump railed against mail-in ballots for months, with no evidence to back that it favors Democrats. Multiple studies on mail-in voting have found it helps increase overall voter turnout but do not have a partisan effect, the New York Times reported. In the previous presidential race, Trump won nine of the 16 states where more than half of voters voted by mail. Electoral fraud via mail-in ballots is extremely rare, it does not help one party over another.
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