Trump admits he's refusing to fund the Postal Service to stop mail-in voting

Donald Trump on Thursday admitted that he is trying to sabotage an effort to increase the number of people who can vote by mail in 2020 by blocking funding to the United States Postal Service — supporting fears that Trump is purposefully obstructing efforts to make voting during the coronavirus pandemic safer.

Trump’s admission came in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo.

“They want $3.5 billion for the mail-in votes, universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the post office. Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. Now in the meantime they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it,” Trump said.

He continued his assertions, saying, “So if you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t …” before resuming his complaints about how much money was under discussion.

Trump has been railing against the practice of voting by mail for weeks as numerous states have sought to expand the method amid the COVID-19 pandemic to allow voters to safely cast ballots from home and not spread the virus through in-person voting.

Trump has falsely claimed that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and susceptible to foreign interference, even though experts say that there are numerous safeguards to ensure ballots are being cast properly, and that forging ballots on a mass scale is nearly impossible.

Trump has admitted that he doesn’t like voting by mail because he believes it makes it easier to vote and benefits Democrats, telling “Fox & Friends” in March “if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

There is no evidence to support that claim either.

Senate Republicans are helping Trump in his efforts to sabotage vote-by-mail efforts by refusing to provide additional election funding even as states struggle to pay the added costs.

The Trump campaign is trying to suppress the vote as well by filing lawsuits against voting by mail.

Democrats, for their part, are still pushing for more funding for elections as well as for the United States Postal Service.

They’re demanding an investigation into the current postmaster general, a Trump donor who appears to be purposefully sabotaging the government agency he’s tasked with leading.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.