President Trump voted by mail in Florida’s primary elections this week, just weeks after branding the very same practice “cheating” and while his administration fights in the Supreme Court to gut mail-in voting access nationwide.
Palm Beach County records show Trump requested an absentee ballot for Florida’s Republican primary, with his completed ballot received August 14, The Independent reported. Trump hasn’t set foot in Florida since May and previously voted by mail in a March special election too.
Just days after that March vote, Trump attacked the very method he’d used at an event in Tennessee, proclaiming, “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.”
He’s kept up the rhetoric since, calling mail ballots “inherently corrupt” during a July speech and demanding “no more crooked mail-in ballots” in his February State of the Union address — even though his own use of mail-in voting goes back years.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales defended the apparent contradiction, arguing Trump’s proposed mail-in voting crackdown in the SAVE America Act includes exceptions for illness, disability, military service and travel.
“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.,” Wales said. “This is a non-story.”
Trump’s administration is currently pressing the Supreme Court for emergency permission to implement sweeping mail-in ballot restrictions ahead of November’s midterms, after federal courts blocked a related executive order creating a national voter eligibility list. Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states, dozens of election officials, and more than 50 former state and federal judges have warned the restrictions could create “chaos,” with a bipartisan coalition of 118 current and former election officials saying workers are now scrambling under threat of criminal prosecution to overhaul systems just weeks before ballots go out.
Florida voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick nominees for governor and a special Senate primary, races that will test how much appetite remains for Trump’s mail-voting crackdown even as he continues relying on it himself.
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