President Donald Trump has once again set the news media ablaze with an apparently off the cuff tweet aimed at delaying the election. After pointing out the dangers of widespread mail-in voting, the president asked, “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
Social media gadflies were quick to pounce, exclaiming that this was the president’s plan all along and that his desperation to cling to power was on full display. But has a trap been sprung that those who favor mass mail-in ballots fail to see? If Trump appears willing to delay the election because of the evident fraud associated with postal ballots, will opponents in Congress ditch their plans to expand the program nationwide in favor of forcing the president to face the voters on November 3?
The tweet that began it all argued:
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
Yet, as with most things political, the facts only matter in context.
Several hours earlier, Trump had posted a short video from a local news channel that ran an experiment on how many votes would be lost or mislaid through the postal service. For anyone who considers enfranchisement a right to be valued, the disappearance of 3% of the mock ballots should prove a wake-up call.
Check out this Mail-In Voting experiment by a local news station! pic.twitter.com/23tOdt1hYc
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020
In this context, Trump appears to be setting up for a partisan fight.
VoteSafe Act of 2020
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has recently introduced the VoteSafe Act, which “Requires states to permit no-excuse mail-in absentee voting.” It seeks to authorize a $5 billion lump sum to expand vote-by-mail in response to COVID-19. With Democrats and their supporters in the legacy media seemingly blind to reports of actual voter fraud, ignoring the 20% of New Jersey mail-in ballots that were deemed ineligible or the 100,000 that were rejected in California, Trump saw the need to provide a wake-up call to Americans.
What better way to do it than to set the internet on fire?
As Liberty Nation’s Graham J. Noble recently wrote:
“The latest effort by the left is to promote mail-in voting, which obviously creates the potential for election fraud on a massive scale. Just as concerning, though, is the fact that the entire electoral process, if conducted exclusively by mail, is removed from the public gaze. Elections would become virtually secret affairs – bureaucratic procedures over which the public has no say and no control. Nothing is more fair, simple, and transparent than citizens going to a polling station, producing identification, marking their ballot paper, and putting it in the box. When people who claim to be defending democracy suggest a complete overhaul of the electoral process, Americans should be afraid. They should be very afraid.”
Back to Reality
The fact is that despite what the vipers’ nest of the TwitterZone insists, President Trump did not suggest that he would cancel or delay the election. No matter what the headlines of the usual suspects in the Fourth Estate may write, this tweet was neither a suggestion nor a call to action.
The Constitution lays out clearly who can decide the aspects of a national election – and it’s not the man in the White House:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
The purpose of this inflammatory tweet appears to be one of two things. Either POTUS has decided to troll his opponents, or he is seeking to highlight voter fraud and thereby derail Kamala Harris’ latest bill.
Either way, he has done what the media has failed to do: start a genuine conversation on voter fraud.
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Read more from Mark Angelides.
