Trump: Mail-in ‘mess’ in Qns.
Hypes fraud smear in tight vote
President Trump’s sticking his nose into his hometown’s most embattled primary race.
The Queens-born president suggested Monday that there should be a do-over in New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s hotly contested primary because of mail-in ballot issues, tying the fraught election to his unfounded fears of voter fraud.
In a briefing from the White House, Trump said it was “a disaster” that results still have not been finalized in Maloney’s June 23 Democratic primary against progressive insurgent candidate Suraj Patel.
“I think you probably have to take the Carolyn Maloney race and run it over again,” Trump told reporters. “They are six weeks into it now and they have no clue what’s going on, and I think I can say right here and now, you have to rerun that race because it’s a mess.”
The battle for Maloney’s congressional district, which spans Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, has been hampered by mass invalidation of mail-in ballots.
Patel, who trails Maloney by about 3,700 voters in unofficial results, recently joined a federal lawsuit alleging that some 1,200 ballots were wrongfully thrown out in his race for missing postmarks.
Late Monday, a judge ruled that all ballots cast in New York primaries must be counted even if they don’t have postmarks, as long as they were received by June 30.
In total, as many as 12,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in the Maloney race, even though the state urged people to vote by mail for safety reasons amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump connected the chaos in the Maloney primary to his baseless claim that November’s presidential election will be “rigged” for the Democrats if mail-in ballots are made widely available.
“Mail-in ballots is going to be a great embarrassment to our country,” he said.
Maloney suggested Patel’s to blame for Trump’s focus on their race.
“There are 1,200 absentee ballots without postmarks which all candidates have called to be counted, and I have a 3,700-vote lead. Suraj Patel is singing Donald Trump’s song to undermine confidence in our election process,” Maloney told the Daily News.
Patel, who has not conceded the election, punched back by pointing out that
Maloney never joined the lawsuit that produced the late Monday ruling on the 1,200 invalidated ballots.
“[Maloney], who refuses to return donations from Donald Trump, would rather attack me, the son of immigrants and an Obama and Biden alum, than fight for her constituents’ votes to count,” Patel tweeted. “PS that lawsuit you ‘weren’t ready to sign onto’ with us?‘ We just won.”
Trump also said in his briefing that he’s filing a lawsuit this week in hopes of blocking Nevada’s bid to make mail-in ballots available to all registered voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
“We will be suing Nevada,” he said.
Despite Trump’s frequent fraud fretting, there’s no evidence that mail-in ballots in would make November’s election more susceptible to voter fraud. There’s also no evidence that it would somehow result in the election being rigged for Joe Biden and other Democrats.
However, election experts from both sides of the aisle have viewed the MaloneyPatel race with concern, fearing that the high invalidation rates and subsequent delays in results could spell trouble for November’s election — especially if similar snafus unfold across the country.
“It gives President Trump more time to tweet about how the election’s being stolen from him,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT. “It gives people more time to spin out off-the-rails scenarios.”