 You know before COVID-19 there really was no reason to not support mail-in voting But if you didn't support it before then living through a literal pandemic should actually make you see why mail-in voting is so important But Donald Trump does not support mail-in voting and he's been very vocal about why he thinks it's not just bad But literally an existential threat to democracy So he's being a little bit hyperbolic But Donald Trump is a compulsive liar and the thing about compulsive liars is that they lie so frequently that often times They're not even consciously aware of the fact that they are lying But what he says about mail-in voting is so extreme So exaggerated that it doesn't even fall into the same category as his usual lies So he tweeted out if people can go out and protest riot break into stores and create all sorts of havoc They can also go out and vote and keep our election honest with millions of mail-in ballots being sent out Who knows where they are going and to whom well, we do know actually He continues because of mail-in ballots 2020 will be the most rigged election in our nation's history Apparently he hasn't heard about the 2000 election when the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush Nonetheless, he continues unless this stupidity is ended We voted during World War one and World War two with no problem But now they're using COVID in order to cheat by using mail-ins rig 2020 election Millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries and others It will be the scandal of our times. Okay, so, you know aside from the fact that what we just read was Batshit fucking insane. He's doing two things here The first thing he's trying to do is lower expectations, right? Because if the polls hold he will lose the selection in November So he doesn't want it to be as shocking to his supporters The second thing he's doing is he is preemptively coming up with an excuse in the event. He loses It's not because he did anything wrong. It's not because he failed. It's because Democracy the system itself has failed. So do you understand what he's doing? He's trying to literally Throw the entire system under a bus all to save face I Mean there is absolutely nothing he won't do to protect his own power to make sure that he looks good and He was asked by a reporter What evidence is there to suggest that mail-in voting is conducive to widespread voter fraud and Predictably he couldn't give the reporter any evidence Because there is no evidence that this is in fact a thing that leads to voter fraud Respectfully sir, I covered politics in Colorado for five years This morning you tweeted about how mail-in ballots will be will be fraudulent But I never did a story or heard your friend senator Cory Gardner say that mail-in ballots are fraudulent people in Colorado have been voting voting by mail For years sir any specific evidence? Where is the specific evidence that there is there is there are thousands of cases all over? Thousands I don't like the system and I did pretty well in Colorado could have won put Colorado, but I could have won I almost do you blame mail-in ballots for I can't tell you what it is. I thought I would have won Colorado Frankly, I love Colorado and the people like me and we have a lot of the similar values We do a lot of economic development there a lot of things are planned. No, I don't like mail-in ballots I don't think it's good for Colorado either. I don't know. Did they find anything in Colorado? I can tell you this there are thousands of cases all over the one an example an Example all over the country of thousands of cases a friend of mine gets a ballot his son Unfortunately passed away seven years ago. He gets a ballot for his son to vote That's one case, but there are thousands and thousands of cases The other thing is with mail-in ballots people can forge them foreign countries can print them They get the same paper the same press order them to have Americans print the ballots I'm not ordering anything. I'm just we shouldn't have mail-in ballots You should have certain things if you can't be at a location like I'm here and I can't vote in Florida I'm at the White House, so you do something Where that's taken care of and that works out fine, but in California They sent tens of millions of slips out of ballots out They put them in mailboxes people take them they take them from the mailman and they print them They fraudulently print them. It's a very bad system It's gonna lead to a tremendous fraud and we're trying to stop it mail-in ballots are a disaster listening to Donald Trump speak is So frustrating it drives me nuts because he's asked a very specific question about mail-in voting and voter fraud And he starts talking about himself. Oh, well, you know, I don't know why I lost Colorado You know, there's a lot of people there that agree with me pay attention. Don't hard We're talking about mail-in voting and I'm asking you for evidence that there's fraud. We're not talking about you We're talking about this issue pay attention dummy But the reason why he didn't give a specific answer the reason why he couldn't cite evidence is because there is none You see the Heritage Foundation is a conservative organization that has been cataloging instances of voter fraud And they have not tracked instances where a foreign government has given ballots to people illegally to vote In fact, when you look at states with mail-in voting According to the conservative Heritage Foundation, it's not an issue take Oregon for example we've had mail-in voting here for two decades and the Heritage Foundation found 14 cases of voter fraud since 2000 2000 that's 20 years not an issue in Colorado a state with mail-in voting since 2014 Found the same number 14 instances of voter fraud There were 12 cases of voter fraud in Washington state since 2004 and in Hawaii There were two cases of voter fraud although in these instances what was found were false registrations So in these two cases, they didn't even get to commit the act of voter fraud before they were caught They just registered and in the state of Utah also with mail-in voting They found one false registration in other words. This is not an issue now The New York Times explains studies have shown that all forms of voting fraud are Extremely rare in the United States a national study in 2016 found few credible allegations of fraudulent voting a panel that mr. Trump Charged with investigating election corruption found no real evidence of fraud before he disbanded it in 2018 five states including the Republican bastion of Utah now conduct all elections almost entirely by mail They report very little fraud the state is among the six states with the highest percentage of mail-in votes in the last election in 2018 all of which had a Republican state election supervisors at the time according to David J. Becker the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research Colorado which has 3.5 million registered voters has been a vote-by-mail state since 2014 There's just very little evidence that there is more than a handful of fraudulent vote-by-mail cases across the country in a given election Cycle said Judd Chote the new director of elections in the Colorado Department of State now the article goes on to explain that in the rare instances Where voter fraud does occur? Yes It is more likely to happen by absentee voting than actually at you know the polling place But that doesn't mean that it's a common phenomenon It doesn't mean that if you have mail-in voting in all 50 states that all of a sudden our election is insecure In fact during a pandemic that makes our elections more secure because people aren't going to feel secure Voting during a pandemic risking their health to do so, right? So it's voter suppression if you force people to vote at polling stations publicly during a pandemic and on top of that One benefit of mail-in voting is that it minimizes the risk of election fraud because there is a real difference between voter fraud and Election fraud with voter fraud that is an individual carrying out an act of fraud But when it comes to election fraud that takes place at the state or local level and is carried out often times by political parties or public elected officials in the form of illegal voter purges or this Kentucky slashes 95% of polling places ahead of primary election. So understand what they're doing They're gonna go from 3700 polling stations down to 200 for Kentucky's 4.5 million residents and as Ari Berman points out there will be one polling place for 616,000 registered voters in Louisville's Jefferson County where half the state's black voters live But yet Donald Trump has the nerve to claim that mail-in voting is going to lead to election rigging No, it's going to stop election rigging that the Republican Party tries to do because if you are able to mail in your ballot It doesn't matter if the Republican Party is going to cut the number of polling places. It doesn't matter Democrats do this during primaries too But if you have mail-in voting that makes the election more democratic So the fact that Kentucky is brazenly doing this I mean that is a rigged election so rigged that I wouldn't trust any election in the United States going forward Unless we have some type of international organization or the UN oversee it because this is rigging So if Donald Trump is concerned with rigging, this is what he needs to worry about not mail-in voting And the situation is worse because by disenfranchising black voters You're hurting the candidate that is positioned to perform better against Mitch McConnell in the general election That's rigging. That's the fraud that we have to worry about election fraud committed by parties and governments Not individuals So what Donald Trump is doing here is he's allowing election rigging to continue in states like Georgia and now Kentucky But he's crying about rigging all those save face for his election if he loses I mean, this is infuriating anyone who cares about democracy and wants a secure election to take place Should want mail-in voting