Trump attacks voteby-mail after weekend of setbacks
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, reeling from a weekend rally that failed to give his reelection campaign a jolt of energy, suggested Monday that if he loses in November, forged mail-in ballots could be partly to blame.
In a tweet, the president argued that vote-by-mail won’t be necessary during the coronavirus pandemic because “we voted during World War One and World War Two with no problem.”
Absentee voting, which began during the Civil War, is becoming increasingly common in the U.S., and Trump is trying to make it a partisan issue. As the coronavirus pandemic makes large gatherings risky, many states have broadened access to absentee ballots in an effort to reduce exposure through in-person voting.
In a separate tweet, Trump claimed that “millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries” to affect the election.
But elections experts say that it would be prohibitively difficult and expensive to attempt to influence an election that way.
To successfully forge mail-in ballots, a foreign power would need to have a list of absentee voters in a state and know who had already voted. It would have to be able to replicate the size, weight and design of the ballots and envelopes in each county, as well as key details like precinct and voter ID numbers and the local races on each ballot. It would have to match the forged signature on the envelope to the one on file, and mail them locally to ensure a proper postmark, said Matthew Weil, director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
If even a few dozen ballots showed up that were slightly off — much less a few million — Weil said they would be set aside and an investigation conducted.
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge criticized Trump’s tweets, calling them “dangerous rhetoric.”
“Scaring his own voters away from a proven method that dates back to the Civil War will have a toll on Republicans up and down the ballot,” said Ridge, a Republican who is co-chairing VoteSafe, a bipartisan group promoting vote-bymail.