Trump tells mail voters to also go to poll as check

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Thursday that people who vote early by mail should show up at polling places and vote again if their ballots haven’t been counted, a slight walk back from his comments a day earlier when he suggested that people vote twice to test the mail-in system.

Trump claims, without evidence, that the Nov. 3 election will be awash in fraud because so many voters will mail in their ballots to avoid being exposed to the coronavirus at polling sites.

The president said people could mail in their ballots as early as possible and then follow up with a trip to the polls to see whether their mail-in vote was tabulated.

Trump said in a lengthy tweet: “If it has you will not be able to Vote & the Mail In System worked properly. If it has not been Counted, VOTE (which is a citizen’s right to do).”

If the mail-in ballot gets to election officials after a person votes at the polls, the in-person vote will be ignored, he said.

“YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED, it hasn’t been “lost, thrown out, or in any way destroyed.”

Voting by mail is meant to replace voting in-person during the pandemic, but Trump doesn’t trust the mail-in system. Having mail-in voters show up at polling places also could create more confusion for election workers.

On Wednesday, Trump was asked by a television reporter during his trip Wednesday to Wilmington, North Carolina, if he has confidence in the voteby-mail system.

“They will vote, and then they are going to have to check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way because if it tabulates, then they won’t be able to do that,” Trump told WECT. “So, let them send it in and let them go vote.

“And if the system is as good as they say it is, then they obviously won’t be able to vote (at the poll). If it isn’t tabulated, they will be able to vote.”

North Carolina’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Stein, said it is outrageous for the president to suggest that people “break the law in order to help him sow chaos in our election.”

“Make sure you vote, but do NOT vote twice!” Stein tweeted.

It’s a felony under North Carolina state law to vote twice. Once someone has cast an absentee ballot, that person may not change or cancel it, or decide to vote in person on Election Day, according to the state election board’s website.

Experts said Trump’s suggestion would lead to chaos, long lines and more work for election officials during a public health crisis.

Karen Hobart Flynn, president of Common Cause, said: “You cannot test election integrity rules by breaking them, any more than you can rob a bank to make sure your money is safe.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany blamed the media for taking Trump’s words out of context. She said the president said mail-in voters should go to the polls to make sure their votes got tabulated, and if they weren’t, they should vote in person.

Trip Gabriel

As returns came in on election night in Florida in 2018, the Republicans running for governor and the Senate took narrow leads in races that were too close to call.

Over the next days, their Democratic opponents reduced the gaps as mailedin votes were counted. President Donald Trump raised an alarm. Demanding that the races be called for Republicans Rick Scott and Ron Desantis, he tweeted falsely that ‘‘large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere,’’ adding: ‘‘An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!’’

Nothing was fraudulent about the ballots tallied in the days after Election Day. And neither Democrat went on to win his race. Yet Trump has never let go of a baseless accusation that Democrats use mail voting to ‘‘steal’’ elections, a piece of disinformation he has promoted all year, including at the Republican National Convention.

Now, with the coronavirus pandemic driving an explosion in absentee voting, and polls suggesting that far more Democrats than Republicans plan to vote by mail, a nightmare scenario haunts Democratic strategists and elected officials.

What if early results in swing states on election night show the president in the lead because most Republicans voted in person, yet in the days afterward, as mail ballots that tilt heavily Democratic are tallied, states flip to Joe Biden?

Would Trump claim premature victory — as he did on behalf of the two Florida Republicans and dangled as a possibility in a tweet in July: ‘‘Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!’’

Would the president, joined by allies in the GOP and the news media, sow distrust in the election by arguing that mail ballots that shift states away from him are ‘‘rigged’’?

Trump has been pushing denunciations of mailed-in votes for months, and his penchant for conspiracy theories is only intensifying, such as saying this week that people in ‘‘dark shadows’’ are behind Biden’s campaign. On Wednesday in North Carolina, the president continued to try to sow doubts over the election’s legitimacy by appearing to encourage voter fraud, suggesting that people vote twice to test the system for its ability to detect the casting of multiple ballots.

The nightmare scenario in November is worth preparing for, many Democrats say.

‘‘We’ve certainly seen candidates trying to get out in front of a narrative and declare victory when all the votes have not been counted,’’ said Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, a Democrat whom Trump has attacked for promoting mail voting.

Benson and other Democrats in Michigan and Pennsylvania — both battleground states — are trying to change election laws that prohibit absentee ballots from being processed or counted before Election Day. As of now, mail-in votes from large Democratic cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit are not reported until after in-person votes, sometimes days later. Party lawyers are girding for a worstcase scenario in which Trump fights in courts and state legislatures after declaring a premature victory.

‘‘There has been (rightly) a lot of concern about this,’’ J.J. Balaban, a Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, said in an email.

In Michigan, Benson predicted that 3 million votes will be cast by mail this year, 60% of the total. She has called for changes to let election clerks process absentee ballots early — opening envelopes, contacting voters if ballot signatures don’t match registrations, and beginning the counting. If the changes don’t pass in the Republican-led Legislature, full results may not be known until the Friday or Saturday after Nov. 3, Benson said. ‘‘Time is running out.’’

Twelve states do not allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day, including the battlegrounds of New Hampshire and Wisconsin as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania. Ohio allows processing but not tablulating the ballots.

A Democratic data group backed by Michael Bloomberg said this week that it is likely that Trump will appear to have won on election night by a landslide, a scenario it called ‘‘a red mirage.’’

‘‘We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,’’ Josh Mendelsohn, chief executive of the group, Hawkfish, told ‘‘Axios on HBO.’’

The company’s survey of registered voters concluded that twice as many planned to cast a ballot by mail as ever before, and that most are Biden supporters.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Thea Mcdonald, called Democrats’ concerns about the president prematurely declaring victory ‘‘an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,’’ adding, ‘‘President Trump and his campaign are fighting for a free, fair, transparent election in which every valid ballot counts — once.’’

The president has raged against mail voting all year, tweeting in May that ‘‘there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-in Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.’’

As Trump demonizes mail ballots, many of his supporters do not plan to use them.

An NBC/WALL Street Journal national poll last month found that nearly half — 47% — of supporters of Biden planned to mail in their votes. Twothirds of Trump supporters — 66% — planned to vote in person on Election Day.

In some states, the discrepancy is even more stark. A recent Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin, another swing state, found that among voters planning to cast a mail ballot, Biden was favored by 67 percentage points. Among those who planned to vote on Election Day, Trump led by 41 points.

Trump himself casts his own Florida ballots as an absentee voter. He has claimed a distinction between ‘‘good’’ absentee ballots and ‘‘bad’’ mail-in ballots, but there is no meaningful difference. His real target seems to be certain states — which this year include California, New Jersey and Utah — where all active registered voters are sent mail-in ballots, not just ballot-request forms. Thirty-four states allow all voters to use an absentee ballot without an excuse, mailing it back or dropping it off.

Elections experts say that absentee or mail voting is potentially more subject to instances of fraud than in-person voting, but that states with a history of all-mail voting have a minuscule number of cases. Wide-scale cheating that could swing a close race would be easy to detect.

Even before Trump injected new partisanship into mail voting, election analysts identified a ‘‘blue shift’’ in how late-counted absentee ballots tend to boost Democratic candidates.

On election night of the 2018 midterms, a predicted wave of Democratic gains looked like a wipeout. But as mail ballots were tallied in the days and weeks afterward, Democrats kept winning close races. Their net gains in the House went from an apparent 26 seats on election night to 41.

‘‘We’re likely to see a significantly dramatic blue shift in multiple states because of the virus and the political response to the virus,’’ said Edward Foley, an election-law expert at Ohio State University, who coined the term ‘‘blue shift.’’

‘‘How will the public process the concept that election night may end in uncertainty, and this phenomenon is not fraud, it’s just the counting process?’’ he said.

Anthony Spano, a Trump supporter in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, said the president was ‘‘so right’’ when he warned of potential fraud by Democrats.

‘‘If they think there’s unrest now, just wait to see if they try to steal this election,’’ said Spano, who has worked as a truck mechanic. ‘‘Personally, I think people that are nonviolent, we’re going to get very violent.’’