President Trump warned on Friday that widespread mail-in voting “is going to be the scam of all time” and said he’s counting on federal judges to stop it.
“I think it’s going to be a terrible time for this country … this is going to be the scam of all time,” the president said at a White House press conference. “Everybody in this room knows it’s a scam. Everybody knows I’m right.”
In comments that appeared to be aimed at federal judges weighing his campaign’s legal challenges to universal mail-in ballots in several states, the president said the courts hold the integrity of the election in the balance.
“We’re counting on federal judges to do a great constitutional job,” the president said. “Right now they’re analyzing it — many, many federal judges. A lot of judges have not yet ruled on this. Hopefully the federal judges — all respected, all highly respected — hopefully they’ll be able to see this clearly and stop it.”
The Trump campaign has gone to court in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Michigan — all hotly contested swing states — to curtail the use of mail-in voting. Many states this year have expanded the voting option due to concerns about the coronavirus.
The president again said there will be “tremendous corruption” if states are allowed to accept tens of millions of mail-in ballots that were sent to voters who didn’t request them.
“They’re sending out tens of millions of ballots — sending ballots at a level they’ll never be able to count them,” Mr. Trump said. “What’s going to happen on Nov. 3 when somebody’s leading and they said, ‘we haven’t counted the ballots. We have millions of ballots to count.’ It’s a disaster, everyone knows it. Where are these ballots going? Who’s sending them? Who’s signing them?”
In Nevada, he said, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak “doesn’t even want verification of the signature.”
Florida officials rejected more than 35,500 vote-by-mail ballots in the state’s recent primary because of missed deadlines or technical flaws, Politico reported Friday. The rejections accounted for about 1.5% of the total vote in the battleground state.
About two-thirds of the rejected absentee ballots were disqualified because they arrived after Florida’s 7 p.m. Election Day deadline, the report said.
