Was Trump Trying To Commit Voter Fraud, Or Is He Just Incompetent?

Could be both.

(Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

As Democrats push for absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic, the GOP has shifted its focus. Where once they warned of the dangers of in-person voting, with Trump spinning yarns about illegal voters who “go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again,” they’re now fear mongering about rampant electoral fraud with mail-in ballots.

“Kids go and they raid the mailboxes and they hand them to people that are signing the ballots down at the end of the street — which is happening — they grab the ballots,” he ad-libbed recently.

If your dad talked like that, you’d take him to the neurologist yesterday. But there does seem to be something hinky going on with those mail-in ballots, at least as far as Donald Trump’s own registration goes.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s first attempt to register to vote in Florida was rejected because he listed the White House — which is in Washington, D.C. and not the state of Florida — as his permanent residence. Moreover, he instructed election officials to send his ballot care of Shawn McCabe, the vice president and general manager of Trump Florida Properties, at yet another address in a neighboring county. And McCabe’s name was misspelled.

Meanwhile, elections officials in Wisconsin are litigating to purge 230,000 voters from the rolls for address and name discrepancies, Texas is threatening to lock up voters who falsely claim a health condition to get their hands on an absentee ballot during a pandemic, and ballots are being rejected in Georgia because someone at the registrars office decides the signature doesn’t match what’s on file.

Trump has never actually lived in Florida, but loudly declared his intention to assume that state’s residency in September. Having belatedly discovered that the presence of his business and residence in New York subjected him to personal jurisdiction there, the president huffily announced that he was upping sticks for sunnier, lower-taxed climes, at least on paper anyway. Henceforth, he will be known as President Florida Man of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.

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Never mind that the club’s operating agreement with the city specifies that the club will not be used as a private residence and indeed bars guests from staying on the property for more than 21 nights in a given year. And never mind that the White House itself is currently flogging a Heritage Foundation compilation of hundreds of people who were actually criminally or civilly charged for electoral fraud. A whopping 65 cases in 2018 alone  — out of 122 million votes cast in the general and 46 million in the primary, so 0.000039 percent. Which is hardly an epidemic, but if you’re howling to throw voters who mess up their ballots in jail, you really ought to take better care with your own ballot.

And your language. On Monday, Trump apparently forgot that he now resides in the Sunshine State, telling America’s governors, “I live in Manhattan.”

(Paging Dr. Goodbrain, please schedule Poppy for an MRI, STAT!)

Will the Heritage Foundation be adding Trump’s name to its list of dangerous criminals who attempted to illegally register to vote and subvert democracy? Will Florida’s Attorney General launch an investigation of potential voter fraud? Or will they go back to screaming that multiple voters named “James Brown” and “Jose Garcia” are scientific proof of rampant cheating?

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Probably the third one, TBH.

President Trump tried to register to vote in Florida using an out-of-state address [Washington Post]


Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.