'Rerun that race': Trump floats do-over in NY Rep. Maloney's primary over mail-in ballot snafu
President Donald Trump suggested Monday that there should be a do-over in New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s hotly contested primary because of mail-in ballot issues, tying the fraught election to his fears of voter fraud.
In a briefing from the White House, the Queens-born president said it was “a disaster” that results still have not been finalized in Maloney’s June 23 Democratic primary against insurgent candidate Suraj Patel.
“I think you probably have to take the Carolyn Maloney race and run it over again,” Trump told reporters. “They are six weeks into it now and they have no clue what’s going on, and I think I can say right here and now, you have to rerun that race because it’s a mess.”
A spokeswoman for Maloney’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment. Patel could not immediately be reached for comment.
The battle for Maloney’s 14th Congressional District spanning Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens has been hampered by mass invalidation of mail-in ballots.
Patel, who trails by fewer than 4,000 votes, has joined a federal lawsuit alleging that more than 1,200 ballots were wrongfully invalidated for missing a postmark, putting the fate of the election on ice as the courts consider the action.
As many as 12,000 ballots in total have been invalidated in the race, even though the state urged people to vote by mail for safety reasons amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump connected the chaos in the Maloney primary to his baseless claim that November’s presidential election will be “rigged” for the Democrats if mail-in ballots are made widely available.
“Mail-in ballots is going to be a great embarrassment to our country,” he said.
Trump said in the briefing that he’s filing a lawsuit in hopes of blocking Nevada’s bid to make mail-in ballots available to all registered voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
“We will be suing in Nevada, and that’s already been taken care of. We will probably file something (Tuesday),” he said.
Despite Trump’s frequent fraud fretting, there’s no evidence to suggest mail-in ballots would make November’s election more susceptible to voter fraud. There’s also no evidence that it would somehow result in the election being rigged for Joe Biden and other Democrats.
However, election experts from both sides of the aisle have viewed the Maloney-Patel race with concern, fearing that the high invalidation rates and subsequent delays in results could spell trouble for November’s election — especially if similar problems unfold across the country.
“It gives President Trump more time to tweet about how the election’s being stolen from him,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT. “It gives people more time to spin out off-the-rails scenarios.”
———
©2020 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
