Trump says NYC mail-in ballot fiasco confirms his voter fraud fears
President Trump on Wednesday said his concerns about mail-in voting are being borne out by New York officials sending botched ballots to nearly 100,000 Brooklyn residents.
For months, Trump has claimed widespread mail-in voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic opens the door to fraud and is likely to delay the Nov. 3 results. Democrats generally say mail-in voting is proven to be reliable and secure.
“We had a problem in New York, they have 100,000 ballots that are a mess,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn as he departed for a campaign trip to Minnesota.
“They’re all confused, all mixed up. Now they say they’re going to redo them. Well, what are they going to do with 100,000 ballots that have already been sent? This is exactly what I’m talking about,” Trump said.
“It’s a big, big, big-scale problem. A hundred thousand ballots went out to New York with the wrong names on them, wrong envelopes, wrong addresses, wrong everything. And now they want to redo the ballots and that doesn’t help because what about the ones that are already sent? This is exactly what I’m talking about.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s staff launched a last-minute attempt to stop New York City’s Board of Elections from resending ballots, The Post reported Tuesday.
The city election agency ordered the vendor that botched the ballot mailings to resend them. But Cuomo wants the city to issue only the correct return envelopes to voters and not send a second ballot.
One source told The Post that the Democratic governor fears resending ballots would allow Trump to claim New Yorkers were voting twice. Absentee ballot envelopes have the same voter ID that is kept in the poll books, making it difficult for anyone to vote twice just because they got a second ballot.
Cuomo told reporters Wednesday that Trump is only “talking about ballot fraud” because “he’s going to say there was fraud in the election and therefore he won’t accept the results and therefore he’s not stepping down. And he’s going to create a Constitutional crisis.”
“There is no way a person discredits an election if they believe they’re going to win. Freudian principles 101,” Cuomo taunted.
New York is not among the nine states — plus Washington, DC — that are automatically sending ballots to all registered voters over Trump’s objections.
Ballots are being mass-mailed California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.