Attorney General William Barr slammed the Democrat Party during an interview on Thursday night for pushing mail-in voting, calling it “grossly irresponsible” and saying that it “could create serious questions about the integrity of the election.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity brought up Barr’s recent interview with Fox News host Mark Levin and proceeded to ask him about “those that want to experiment with different ways of voting.”
“I don’t have confidence in government to fulfill many promises at all,” Hannity said. “Doesn’t it lend itself to great opportunity for fraud?”
Barr, who is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responded: “Yes, I think it is grossly irresponsible to be doing what the Democratic Party is doing now.”
“We’ve had very close races in recent history. The country is divided. If anything, we should be assuring the integrity of our elections so that government going forward will be legitimate and will be accepted as legitimate,” Barr continued. “The idea of conducting elections by wholesale mail-in ballots is reckless and wrong. Everyone knows what has happened in these cases. We’re not talking about voters going, requesting a ballot specifically, saying who they are, proving who they are, and then submitting a ballot by mail.”
“We’re talking about mail-outs to everyone on the voting list. And every experience with that has had thousands and thousands of ballots floating around, not just the state, but the country. I have friends who haven’t lived in California in 21 years who received ballots,” Barr continued. “There are ballots left in boxes in apartment buildings – ballots … for people who used to live at addresses are delivered to those addresses. They can be filled out by anybody.”
“This is reckless,” Barr concluded. “And it could create serious questions about the integrity of the election. And to do this, when there [is] a closely divided country, as we are, is playing with fire, in my view.”
In his interview with Levin, Barr noted that there is nothing wrong with people who “can’t go and vote” applying for a ballot to fill out and then mailing it in, which is known as an absentee ballot.
“There’s no problem with that, especially for states that have been doing that for awhile,” Barr said. “But the idea that you, without any request from the voter, will mail out your voting list, all these thousands and thousands of ballots, is scary, because most of those mailings go to a lot of addresses where the people no longer live. They’re misdirected, and I think they will create a situation – they could easily create a situation where there’s going to be a contested election.”
Barr appeared to suggest that the Department of Justice has been analyzing the media’s coverage of mail-in voting, saying, “And you know, it’s funny, we went and looked back at press coverage of this issue. It wasn’t until Trump was elected that the media changed its tune. Before that, the media used to refer to mail-in ballots as, you know, fraught with fraud or raising questions of fraud or integrity of the vote.”
“It’s only [after] – it’s only recently that they’ve now made it, you know, doctrinal that, oh, there’s no – there’s no issue with mail-in voting,” Barr concluded.