Trump campaign comes up empty when ordered by court to show evidence of vote fraud
Donald Trump has a lengthy history of lying about vote fraud over the past four years, and he regularly claims there’s a difference between absentee voting and mail-in voting, saying that absentee is safe while mail-in is not. They are the exact same thing. You request an absentee ballot in the mail, and then you… mail it back in.
Trump himself and his family vote by mail regularly so they didn’t have to travel to New York in the past, and now Florida:
Trump submitted the Florida primary ballot by giving it to a third party to return, a spokesperson for the Palm Beach elections supervisor confirmed to NPR on Wednesday. Republicans often derisively refer to sending in a ballot this way as “ballot harvesting,” and it’s something Trump has criticized.
“GET RID OF BALLOT HARVESTING, IT IS RAMPANT WITH FRAUD,” he tweeted in April.
The only recent fraud and illegality I can recall — as mentioned in the story I linked above above — regarding ballot harvesting was committed by a Republican:
A GOP operative illegally collected and potentially tampered with ballots in a U.S. House race in North Carolina, eventually leading state authorities to overturn the election results
Politifact has dumped on Trump on this topic twice before: on, inventing differences between absentee and mail-in voting, and that people are sitting in living rooms faking thousands of ballots.
Both are lies, and add this to the pile: the Trump campaign is suing multiple states trying to rewrite their election law via lawsuits to shutdown vote by mail, and notably in Pennsylvania, a court there ordered the campaign to provide all its evidence of vote fraud in the state to back up its wild claims of massive fraud. The mainstream media have repeatedly asked the campaign to provide evidence of its fraud claims just like this before, and the campaign always ignores them, but it can’t ignore a court order. To the surprise of precisely nobody, Trump’s people couldn’t provide any substantive evidence of fraud in Pennsylvania.
Republicans have been running on fake claims of vote fraud for decades. Once in power, George W. Bush had his Department of Justice spend five years investigating the issue, and they found basically no substantive vote fraud in America. The results, which have been confirmed by other studies which also found little or no vote vraud, were a disaster for the GOP, and yet they just won’t stop trying to stop Americans from voting.
The primary threat to fair elections in the United States continues to be vote suppression campaigns by Republicans that make voting harder for minorities and poor Americans.