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- President Donald Trump is obsessed with mail-in ballots and how to “block” Americans who vote by mail, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
- Trump asserted that the US Postal Service should not receive more money so people cannot vote by mail.
- The president claimed that postal voting allowed widespread fraud, a claim rejected by election officials.
- Democrats, including former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, accuse the president of seeking to suppress votes with his attacks on postal voting.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump is obsessed with postal ballots and spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to “block” that vote, a central administration source told The Washington Post.
According to the source, the president spends a considerable amount of time “reading reports and other documents on the postal ballots, discussing the subject with his advisers and thinking about how to block such a vote.”
The Post reports that Trump recently met with Congressional Republicans to voice his concerns, citing a recent case of electoral fraud in New Jersey. Election experts told NPR it was very rare and highlighted the effectiveness of existing measures to guard against fraud.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews defended Trump in a statement to the Post, and said he was working “to ensure the security and integrity of our election.”
“All Americans deserve a fair and balanced electoral system, and President Trump emphasizes that the Democrats’ plan for universal postal voting would lead to fraud,” Matthews said.
In recent weeks, Trump has stepped up his criticism of mail-in ballots, with a huge increase in the number of Americans voting by mail expected this year amid the coronavirus crisis.
Traditionally, postal voting has benefited the Democratic Party more than the Republicans, but some recent studies have called this assumption into question.
The president claimed the mail-in ballots were vulnerable to widespread fraud and refused to grant an increase in funding for the U.S. Postal Service, demanded by Democrats as part of a coronavirus relief program.
Experts say concerns that postal votes could be falsified on a large scale are unfounded. Democrats accused the president of seeking to delegitimize thousands of votes, or suppress the vote, to fix the election.
The Post, in its report, chronicles Trump’s long-standing hostility to the USPS, including his claims that voter fraud resulted in Hillary Clinton’s victory over him in the popular vote in the election of 2016.
He also explores his claim that the service gave preferential treatment to Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos. Trump has attacked Bezos for the Washington Post’s coverage of his administration, which Bezos owns.
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