US President Donald Trump talks to supporters upon arrival at Wilmington International Airport in Wilmington, North Carolina, on September 2, 2020.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump suggested that people in North Carolina should vote twice in the November election, once by mail and once in-person, escalating his attempts to cast confusion and doubt on the validity of the results.
“So let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” Trump said when asked whether he has confidence in the mail-in system in the battleground state.
“If it’s as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. So that’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do,” he said.
It is illegal to vote more than once in an election.
Trump has made countless false statements about the security of voting by mail ahead of the 2020 election, as much of the country braces for an increase of voters to opt for mail-in ballots amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“I don’t like that,” Trump responded when a reporter told him that 600,000 voters in North Carolina, a critical battleground state, could vote absentee.
When asked about Trump’s comments during an interview later Wednesday with CNN, Attorney General William Barr argued that a 2005 bipartisan report on election reform found that mail-in voting is “fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion.”
Asked why there have been no findings, however, of widespread fraud, Barr responded: “We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots that’s being proposed.”
Barr said he was unaware of the specific laws in North Carolina and did not respond directly to questions about Trump’s earlier comments.
Trump made similar claims about mail-in ballots during his 2016 campaign, essentially encouraging his supporters to commit voter fraud.
At a rally in Colorado just days before he was elected, Trump told supporters to obtain new ballots because “do you think those (mail-in) ballots are properly counted?”