GOP fears Trump attacks on mail voting may backfire
The U.S. election is less than 90 days away, and U.S. President Donald Trump continues to attack voting by mail.
"You see them all over the internet. They've had some, just horrible stories on mail-in ballots."
But his own Republican party is scrambling to counter the president's message on absentee ballots amid growing evidence it could help Democrats in the crucial November 3 contest.
State and local election data show Democratic voters are embracing mail ballots at rates well ahead of their Republican counterparts.
Republicans are now worried Democrats will rack up significantly more mail-in votes by November, an advantage that may be tough to overcome if the pandemic depresses turnout on Election Day.
In key battleground states, including Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, GOP officials last month sent fliers to millions of Republican voters urging them to request absentee ballots.
The mailers even featured *part* of a Trump tweet from June 28: “Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them.”
But it obscured the rest of the tweet: “Mail-in voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt election in USA history."
The terms absentee voting and mail-in balloting are synonymous in most U.S. states; both generally mean filling out a ballot at home, then dropping it in the mail.
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that states which issue absentee ballots on demand are prone to voter fraud.
Election experts who have studied decades of U.S. elections say such cheating is rare.
