A reporter for the Washington Post accused President Trump of spreading misinformation about voter fraud in Michigan and elsewhere in the country.
“Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election. This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State,” Trump said in a tweet Wednesday morning. “I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path.”
Philip Bump, a national correspondent for the Washington Post, said Trump was not honest about the situation in Michigan.
“The state isn’t simply offering mail-in ballots to each of its 7.7 million voters,” Bump wrote. “It’s just making it easier for Michiganders to avail themselves of the option, should they wish to do so. One important bit of context is that 1.3 million voters in the state, about a fifth of the total, already are permanent absentee voters, meaning they cast ballots by mail in every election.”
As for voter suppression or voter fraud in Michigan, Bump said, “Those who’ve paid attention to the news at any point in the past four years probably are familiar with Trump’s frequent invocations of the threat posed by voter fraud,” calling it “a threat that has never manifested in demonstrated fraud at any significant scale.”
“For Trump, the phrase ‘voter fraud’ is more of a cudgel than a reflection of reality,” Bump wrote. “As the 2016 election approached, he offered grim warnings about how the Democrats would use fraud to steal the election from him — a neat bit of before-the-fact excuse-making.”
Late last year, a public-interest group sued the city of Detroit in federal court, claiming it had thousands of dead people on its voter lists and duplicate names of registered voters, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Months earlier, a city clerk for Southfield, Michigan, was arrested for reportedly altering voter records so that hundreds of voters were determined to be invalid.
Trump has repeatedly criticized a federal vote-by-mail system despite reminders from his critics that he has been voting by mail for years.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said in March during an interview with Fox News. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
