President Donald Trump claimed on an interview with Axios on HBO that mail in voting could delay the results of the November presidential election by months.
“You know, you could have a case where this election won’t be decided on the evening of Nov. 3. This election could be decided two months later,” said Trump.
The interview was released on Tuesday, and in it Trump once again claimed the dangers of mail-in voting and its effects on fraud.
“Somebody got a ballot for a dog. Somebody got a ballot for something else. You got millions of ballots going. Nobody even knows where they’re going,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments regarding mail-in voting are suspected to be a pre-emptive attempt to spin the narrative in case he loses the election come November. Currently, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is leading against Trump in national polls by a wide margin. However, Trump stated in a July interview that these are “fake polls.”
“I’m not losing because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake,” Trump claimed.
Trump also said that there will be greater amounts of voting by mail in November because of the coronavirus, which likely is true. But most states that allow mail-in voting require voters to fill out applications beforehand and have security measures in place, asking for personal information such as a driver’s license number and using tracking in order to ensure that fraud does not happen.
Several states do mail ballots to voters, such as Oregon, Washington and this year California (which has made this decision due to the COVID-19 pandemic). However, Oregon has only documented approximately a dozen cases of voter fraud among 100 million ballots since 2000.
In the interview, Trump stated that he and his campaign are attempting to end mail-in voting through court. He still claims that he is “OK” with absentee voting, though mail-in voting and absentee voting are widely as synonyms.
