Twitter has placed a notice on yet another one of President Donald Trump’s tweets that contain misinformation about the ongoing presidential race. Early Monday, Trump tweeted that “Ballots being returned to States cannot be accurately counted,” insisting that “Many things are already going very wrong!” It’s unclear what precisely he is even trying to talk about, since, amazingly, there is not a single identifying detail in the tweet. Many of his past claims about supposed fraud in mail-in and/or “universal mail-in” voting have been outright lies. Now, next to the original text of this new tweet from Trump, Twitter has placed a link where voters can click to “learn how voting by mail is safe and secure,” it says.
Check out the notice from Twitter in the image below:
It seems perhaps difficult to fact-check this new claim from the president because he did not even name a state where these alleged issues are taking place. He sounds like he’s just posting whatever comes to mind, perhaps after watching some of the obviously slanted coverage of ongoing issues from Fox News. The fact of the matter is: mail-in voting does not automatically introduce some kind of system-threatening fraud into U.S. elections. Mail-in voting has been used at significant levels in the U.S. even before the Coronavirus set in and made in-person voting more precarious — in 2016, almost one out of every four participating voters cast their ballot via the mail. The issues are not there, period.
Trump has suggested that he may not even accept the election results and ensure a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November, indicating how his nonsensical claims of some kind of systematic threat from mail-in voting have potential real world consequences. Around the 2016 election, Trump also wheeled out nonsensical claims of some kind of vast voter fraud — but he won the election, so the United States never faced the result of him using those claims as a basis to reject the legitimacy of election results in which he lost.
