President Donald Trump has spent awhile winding himself up into a rage over “mail-in” and/or “universal mail-in” voting, which he claims is full of fraud. Despite the fact that mail-in voting has been used at significant levels in the United States for awhile, Trump has even claimed that foreign countries could submit fraudulent ballots to be counted among ballots from actual voters, but — according to an intelligence official from the Trump administration itself — there’s no evidence for this claim. During an appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation over the weekend, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows claimed that Trump has simply been “stating the facts” on mail-in voting — but he definitely has not.
Meadows said:
‘I don’t know that [Trump] is publicly undermining confidence as much as he is stating the facts. We’ve got states that actually are doing things that you would qualify as a scam when you start to look at allowing mail-in ballots to come in seven, nine days after November 3rd, changing the laws through judges that are not legislators — I think that that’s a real problem, and so you can call it what you will, but what you can call it is unusual and unique, and we need to make sure that what we do is protect the ballot process to make sure that we’re not creating a situation that is wrought with fraud.’
Meadows is wrong.
Watch his dubious comments below:
"I don't know that he is publicly undermining confidence as much as he is stating the facts," @MarkMeadows defends @realDonaldTrump as he continues to blast #MailInBallots
This comes as @CBSNews estimates that 30 million Americans are going to vote by mail for #election2020 pic.twitter.com/VTV3mT7z4P
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) September 27, 2020
States are not simply allowing any ballots that come in after Election Day to be counted among the overall totals — Meadows insisted that states “are doing things that you would qualify as a scam,” but this claim is a lie. Postmarks — which are not some kind of complicated piece of technology! — will be the basis for many of these determinations of whether a mail-in ballot received after Election Day should be counted. To take one example, in cases in Pennsylvania where ballots received after Election Day do not have postmarks, authorities will assume that the ballots that are received during a three-day post-Election Day period were mailed before Election Day unless a “preponderance of the evidence” proves otherwise. In other words, Meadows’s vague insinuations that election authorities are walking into the metaphorical dark are baseless.
It’s important to note — intelligence officials from the Trump administration itself dispute the conclusion that there’s any kind of systematic threat from (presumably intentional) mail-in ballot fraud. (The level of systematic fraud that Trump claims is looming would likely require a high degree of intentionality, and he has specifically — and baselessly — claimed that Democrats are “rigging” the election. This claim is not true, period.)
Recently, one senior intelligence official said that they “have no information or intelligence that any nation state threat actor is engaging in activity… to undermine any part of the mail-in vote or ballots.” Meanwhile, a senior FBI official also confirmed that their agency “has not seen, to date, a coordinated national voter fraud effort during a major election and it would be extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of model alone.”
