As soon as once more, Donald Trump is attempting to have it each methods: falsely claiming that Democrats will commit election fraud whereas additionally telling his personal supporters to go … vote within the election. However in contrast to in 2020, Trump is now encouraging individuals to vote by mail, a voting methodology he has lengthy criticized.
“Christians must register to VOTE now,” Trump posted on X on Monday, together with a hyperlink to an internet site referred to as Swamp the Vote, which is paid for by the Republican Nationwide Committee. The web page consists of a video of Trump telling viewers they “must use every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats. … Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in person, we are going to protect the vote.”
This vote-by-mail push comes regardless of Trump’s lies about mail-in voting. Forward of the 2020 presidential election, he referred to as mail-in voting a “disaster” and falsely accused it of being “substantially fraudulent.”
Nonetheless, Trump additionally pushed vote-by-mail in a submit on his Reality Social platform on Monday, telling Pennsylvanians the deadlines to request and return mail-in ballots of their state.
“The way you win is to swamp them,” Trump mentioned within the video. “If we swamp them, they can’t cheat. It just doesn’t work out.”
So which is it? Is he saying that voting is rigged or that it’s safe? (After all, in actuality, it is safe, with no signal of widespread voter fraud.)
This 12 months, Trump and the Republican Get together are hedging their bets, priming their base for supposed “fraud” (i.e., Trump dropping) amid polls that present a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. And to date? The bottom appears to be shopping for it. Republicans are extra prone to belief Trump about election outcomes than they’re the federal government or information retailers, in accordance with a latest ballot from the Related Press-NORC Middle for Public Affairs Analysis and USAFacts.
Worse, in accordance with information from the nonpartisan Public Faith Analysis Institute, 19% of Republicans imagine that if Trump loses, he ought to declare the outcomes invalid and “do whatever it takes” to get into workplace. And whereas 12% of Democrats troublingly say the identical factor about what Harris ought to do, solely one of many two candidates has a historical past of attempting to overturn election outcomes to carry onto energy.
The charged rhetoric and actions of Trump and his allies is what actually threatens our elections. creating the chaos that’s making our election system unstable. Election employees and officers have confronted an onslaught of right-wing misinformation, harassment, and violence. It’s gotten so dangerous that this 12 months election employees are getting ready for Election Day with bulletproof glass and panic buttons, in accordance with the Related Press.
Lately, Republican voter-suppression efforts in Georgia largely failed, eradicating from the voting rolls solely about 1% of the 63,000 voters they challenged this summer time and fall. And on Friday, in an look on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ present, far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia additionally claimed—with out proof, naturally—{that a} voter in Whitfield County, Georgia, had their vote modified by a Dominion Voting Programs machine. (Sure, the identical Dominion that Fox Information needed to pay practically $800 million after the community aired false claims concerning the firm committing voter fraud.)
“This is exactly the kind of fraud we saw in 2020 and it cannot be tolerated,” Taylor Greene mentioned in a submit on X on Friday.
In the meantime, showing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger mentioned he’d seen no proof of fraud and went as far as immediately debunking Greene’s lie.
“What happened with Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain, you know, selection, and then when she printed out the ballot, she … saw that, and so then she made them aware of it, and it got corrected,” Raffensperger mentioned. “And then it got blown out of proportion by people that like to use, you know, Twitter and other forms of social media.”
Raffensperger additionally addressed Trump’s nonsensical declare that paper ballots aren’t broadly used, telling a podcaster in September that one technique to “solve” (nonexistent) voter fraud was to “go to paper ballots.”
“In Georgia, 100% of all the votes cast will be on a paper ballot,” Raffensperger mentioned on CBS. “But actually, nationwide, it’s going to be over 96 to 97% of all voting in America will be on paper ballots.”
However in fact, the persistent false claims of fraud serve to mobilize the MAGA base, which thrives on misinformation and worry.
