Trump trashed mail voting for months. He now says it’s great for Florida.
After months warning that voting by mail is riddled with fraud and would be used to rig the election against him, President Donald Trump suddenly reversed himself on Tuesday — at least as far as Florida is concerned.
Trump now says voting by mail in Florida is great.
“Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA,” he wrote Tuesday afternoon on Twitter.
Trump’s about face likely stems from self interest. Florida’s 29 electoral votes, more than a tenth of the 270 needed to win the presidency, are critical to his hopes for re-election.
Florida statewide elections are always exceedingly close. One reason Republicans win most statewide elections is that they have always urged their voters to vote by mail, and have often done better at Democrats in turning out mail voters.
So the very thing Trump has been trashing could make the difference in whether he wins or loses in Florida — a state in which polling shows him trailing Democrat Joe Biden. Three high-quality Florida polls released last week show Biden leading Trump by an average of 4 percentage points.
In the 2016 presidential election, Trump won 49% of the vote statewide to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 47.8%. In that election, 1.1 million Florida Republicans cast mail ballots — 58,224 more than the 1 million mail ballots cast by Democrats. Trump defeated Clinton by 112,911 votes.
Despite Trump’s repeated assertions that there is something wrong with mail voting, there isn’t evidence to support the president’s claim of widespread voter fraud.
Recently Trump shifted his complaints to suggest that mail voting is bad but absentee voting is good, asserting that there is a difference. There isn’t actually any difference. Mail voting was once called absentee voting, something that stems from a long ago era when someone needed a reason to for an absentee ballot, such as being out-of-town on Election Day.
Florida eliminated the requirement that voters have a reason for a mail ballot as part of reforms that came after the 2000 George W. Bush-Al Gore presidential election. And state law has been changed so that “absentee balloting” no longer exists in the state.
There’s a twist to Trump’s assertions about mail voting. Like Vice Preisdent Mike Pence and many Trump advisers, the president votes by mail.
Last year, when Trump was mad at his longtime home state of New York, he announced that he was making Florida his home state. The president and First Lady Melania Trump voted by mail in the state’s March 17 presidential primary.
Trump and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany have falsely claimed that Trump voted by mail in Florida because his job kept him away from his legal residence in Palm Beach County.
Actually, Trump was in Palm Beach County — where he’s made his Mar-a-Lago Club his legal address for voting purposes — on March 7 and 8, the first weekend of early voting for the March 17 presidential primary. He didn’t leave until Monday morning March 9.
He could have voted at any of the county’s 16 early-voting sites. White House press pool reports show he spent part of the both weekend days at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. The golf club is across the street from a library where early voting was offered from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. both days.
This is a developing story, so check back for updates. Click here to have breaking news alerts sent directly to your inbox.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com or on Twitter @browardpolitics
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