Former Vice President Joe Biden is predicting President Donald Trump will refuse to concede in November after the president warned of widespread voter fraud over the use of mail-in ballots.
“This president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work. They’re not real. They’re not fair,” Biden said during a Thursday virtual fundraiser as reported by Fox News.
The comment comes as Democrats and the Biden campaign aggressively pursue an election conducted entirely by mail-in voting with few more than 100 days until Nov. 3, a process that many states have little experience with, while the few that do took years to successfully manage.
Attacks from Democrats target Trump’s vocal skepticism of implementing a new federalized voting apparatus mandating states mail ballots to every voter in the country on such short notice.
“Because of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, 2020 will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history – unless this stupidity is ended,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1275062328971497472?s=20
Trump and Republicans, however, have made clear of their support for absentee voting, pointing out the distinction between the two.
“Absentee Ballots are fine because you have to go through a precise process to get your voting privilege,” Trump wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1281556758457188352?s=20
Recent primaries conducted at least in part by mail-in voting, if not almost entirely, have also raised concerns over protecting the integrity of high-stakes elections while adding ammunition to Republican claims that mandating states with little history of operating such contests could jeopardize their security.
In Florida, the Washington Post reports that more than 18,500 ballots went uncounted in its March primary. In Nevada, about 6,700 were declared invalid over officials inability to verify signatures. In Pennsylvania, the courts tossed out “tens of thousands” of ballots for supposedly coming in late.
In New Jersey earlier this month, thousands of voters were told they would not get their ballots until after the July 7 primary day because of computer problems.
“We are not capable of running this election in the time allotted,” one county official told the New Jersey Globe.
In 2012, the New York Times even headlined a piece, “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises,” chronicling the difficulties of mail-in voting.
“There is a bipartisan consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms,” the Times wrote. “Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in the voting booth, statistic show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.”
The Times piece was published, before Democrats began demanding ballots be sent to every voter nationwide, when only a mere fraction of the electorate voted by mail.
In 2005, a commission chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III also voiced major concerns related to mail-in voting, explaining that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of voter fraud” and is “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.” Ballots can be sent to invalid addresses and “voting schemes are far more difficult to detect.”
The accusation that Trump might not accept the election results are nothing new to the 2020 election. Biden made the claim during a June appearance on “The Daily Show” and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton made the same charges four years ago. Clinton would later refuse to concede on election night and waited until the morning after.
Once Trump took office, U.S. intelligence operatives under the direction of the Obama administration attempted several failed attempts to stage a deep-state coup.
