U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that November’s general election should be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic and his unsubstantiated assertions of widespread mail-in voter fraud.
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
The president’s extraordinary proposal, which he is not constitutionally empowered to enforce, represents what appears to be his first attempt at floating a suspension of the election, which is less than 100 days away.
As the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States has worsened in recent months, Democratic officials have warned Trump may seek to seize upon the public health crisis to question the legitimacy of the election or even defy its results.
As several states have implemented mail-in voting measures to limit in-person contact at physical polling places and help ensure Americans’ safety, Trump has routinely advocated against the ballot-casting practice, suggesting that it would yield rampant voter fraud.
But despite the president’s repeated insistence to the contrary, cases of election fraud in the United States are exceedingly rare. Experts acknowledge there are some slightly higher fraud risks with mail-in balloting when proper security measures are not implemented.
Beyond the issues surrounding voter fraud, Trump has also suggested that mail-in voting would yield unfavorable electoral results for the Republican Party. Nonetheless, GOP political operatives have embraced vote-by-mail and a recent study found that it does not benefit one party over another.
Trump’s tweet Thursday comes as the latest public polling of the 2020 White House race shows him continuing to trail former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, by significant margins nationally and in battleground states.