President Donald Trump has no shortage of conspiracy theories, apparently. On Saturday, he rushed to Twitter with a nonsensical claim that the “Unsolicited Mail In Ballot Scam is a major threat to our Democracy,” but his rant has little, if any relationship to reality. Trump pointed out that, on a local level, some recent mail-in ballot-based elections have faced a significant ballot rejection rate, but if anything, those significant rates prove the system’s rigor. Election authorities air on the side of overcompensation for potential issues — there’s no looming national fraud scheme. Also, no matter localized issues, five states already did almost entirely mail-in ballot-based elections prior to this election cycle, and they went rather well.
Trump tweeted:
‘The Unsolicited Mail In Ballot Scam is a major threat to our Democracy, & the Democrats know it. Almost all recent elections using this system, even though much smaller & with far fewer Ballots to count, have ended up being a disaster. Large numbers of missing Ballots & Fraud!’
The Unsolicited Mail In Ballot Scam is a major threat to our Democracy, & the Democrats know it. Almost all recent elections using this system, even though much smaller & with far fewer Ballots to count, have ended up being a disaster. Large numbers of missing Ballots & Fraud!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2020
This is nonsense. His claim that there was a high level of “Fraud” in any recent mail-in ballot-based election is a lie. Rejected ballots don’t mean that any of those ballots were the product of attempted fraud. The rejections simply mean that the ballots did not pass the security procedures that are in place around the country. Also, speaking of the country, Trump rants and raves about the supposed pitfalls of “universal” mail-in voting, but there has never been any legitimate possibility that “universal” mail-in ballots would be used across the country as a whole; they’re simply used in a handful of individual states. Trump simply uses this nonsense as leverage to go after the process of mail-in voting as a whole.
On Saturday afternoon, Trump also claimed that “it turns out that the Mueller Investigation was a total SCAM.” This is a lie. Nobody — at least nobody credible — actually concluded this.
All that time and money spent, and it turns out that the Mueller Investigation was a total SCAM!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2020
Check out Twitter’s response below:
