Trump’s advisers backpedal on delay of election
The White House has no plans to try to delay the Nov. 3 election, chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday, even as he defended a tweet from President Donald Trump that raised the possibility.
“We’re going to hold an election on Nov. 3, and the president is going to win,” Meadows said on CBS News’ Face the Nation.
Trump’s tweet on Thursday, which set off alarm bells throughout Washington, was merely meant to raise questions about whether a major expansion of mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic could produce fraud or lead to untenable delays in counting votes, Meadows insisted.
That tweet warned without evidence that “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history” and ended by asking “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
“There was a question mark,” Meadows said of the tweet. He also argued that vastly expanded mail voting could delay election results by a month or more.
“What we will do is if we try to transform this and start mailing in ballots all across the country, all 50 states, what we will see is a delay because they’re just not equipped to handle it,” he said.
Meadows’s defense comes after Republican lawmakers roundly rejected Trump’s suggestion to delay the election, including several of the president’s most stalwart allies such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. The president does not have the authority to change the date of the general election, which is set by Congress.
“Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time,” McConnell said in a television interview with WNKY of Bowling Green, Ky. “We’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.”