President Donald Trump said Monday that if universal mail-in voting is allowed, the U.S. is “never going to have a fair” presidential election.
In a wide-ranging phone interview with the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the president said that mail-in voting can allow fraud.
“I have to tell you, that if you go with this universal mail-in … tens of millions of ballots being sent to everybody and their dogs, dogs are getting them, OK? People that have been dead for 25 years are getting them, you have to see what’s happening. Then you’re never going to have a fair election,” Trump said.
While fewer than 10 states currently have universal mail-in voting, where ballots are mailed to every registered voter, Democrats are pushing for wider use of the practice, which has prompted the current battle over the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is calling lawmakers back into session next week to hold hearings on the USPS.
Trump said he’s currently taking steps to fix what he called a long-term “disaster” in the USPS’s finances.
“This isn’t a Trump thing. This has been one of the disasters of the world, the way it’s been run,” Trump said. “What am I supposed to do, let it continue to be run badly?”
And Trump called Pelosi’s move a “con game,” saying there is already ample money available to the USPS. “The Post Office, there’s $25 billion sitting there, but they really want $1 trillion to bail out their badly run states,” Trump said of Democratic lawmakers.
Trump also said he would support extending voting to include the weekend before Election Day and adding additional voting booths to ease crowding. “I would support all of that. That’s what you want to do,” Trump said. “I would be for opening more voting booths.
And the president said he’s OK with absentee voting. “I totally support that,” Trump responded. “That’s a great thing.”
In the 50-minute interview, Trump also speculated that Democrats will have a tough time uniting at their party’s convention, which begins today. The president said progressive members of the party are not ecstatic about the ticket of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). In 2016, many supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) refused to support Hillary Clinton.
“These are the same people I beat last time and they’re not gonna unite because they can’t unite, they don’t know how to unite,” Trump said. “Also, Bernie is very unhappy, but actually Biden went further left than Bernie wanted him to and Bernie’s still unhappy.”
“You’ll never make this guy happy … I call him crazy Bernie for a reason,” Trump said.
Trump also ripped Biden, saying he “doesn’t come out of his basement.”
“I’m going to Wisconsin, I can tell you that,” Trump said. “And we’ll be doing a lot of interviews and a lot of, I guess I’m making a speech, and it’s a great place, and we won it last time. I think we’re going to win it this time.”