After a lukewarm response at President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally in months, the president Monday took to his Twitter account to make some predictions about the 2020 election being “rigged.”
Pointing to the prevalence of the mail-in ballot for this year’s election, Trump typed in all caps Monday that he expected election tampering to be “the scandal of our times.”
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
This is at least the second time the president has linked mail-in voting with tampering. In May, Trump said that the mail-voting option, a method more U.S. states are adopting during the coronavirus pandemic, will lead to the "greatest rigged election in history."
There have been absentee ballot frauds in the past, including one in 2018 involving a North Carolina Republican political operative. Leslie McCrae Dowless, was charged in 2019 with three felony counts of obstruction of justice, two counts of conspiring to commit obstruction of justice and two counts of possession of absentee ballots, according to court documents.
Dowless was accused of illegally collected, and sometimes filled in, absentee ballots on behalf of Republican Mark Harris’ campaign emerged shortly after a November 2018 election. They caused the state to hold off certifying Harris’ apparent narrow victory over Democrat Dan McCready.
However, according to some state election board officials, the instances of tampering are few and far between, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis.
As far the national election, several states − run by governors on either side of the aisle − have opted to offer mail-in voting as a a safe alternative to in-person voting in November’s election. Nearly 120,000 people have died from COVID-19 in America, even with social distancing guidelines in place. Several states are experiencing increases in cases, supporting the previous warnings from top infectious disease officials that a second wave would occur.
Trump has moved away from speaking about the impact of the virus, instead putting his focus on America’s economic gains as of late and the campaign. After Saturday’s middling turnout, there have been various reports about what caused it. Some have linked K-pop fans and Tiktok users, who bought several tickets but did not attend, to the reason behind the low turnout.
Trump has reportedly expressed frustration to aides and other officials on his team about the issues causing Saturday’s rally snafu.
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