US President Donald Trump has encouraged those who vote by mail in the November 3 elections to go to polling stations on voting day and try to cast their vote a second time, in order to check if their ballot is already has been computed.
During a visit to Wilmington, North Carolina, he has encouraged recipients of vote-by-mail ballots even if they haven’t requested them to “send it in and then go make sure it counted.”
“If you have not tabulated, vote. Just vote and then if they count it too late, they will see that you have already voted and it will not count,” he defended, according to Bloomberg. “Send it soon and then go and vote,” the president insisted, underlining that if when they go to the electoral college their vote does not appear as already cast, vote again. “The vote will count,” he said.
The suggestion made by Trump could lead to voters breaking the law if they try to vote a second time, as doing so is illegal under federal law. In recent weeks, the president maintains his particular pulse with voting by mail, an option that in the midst of the current pandemic, many Americans are expected to choose. Trump defends that there is a risk of fraud in the vote by mail and that this option will harm him.
In the case of North Carolina, provisional voting is allowed, a process that allows additional scrutiny of ballots if there are doubts about whether a person can vote, including whether they have already voted. However, Trump has not mentioned this procedure in his statements.
Meanwhile, Attorney General William Barr warned in an interview on CNN on Wednesday that states and local authorities are “playing with fire” if they send out tens of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots for the elections. “We do not have the type of widespread use of vote by mail that is being proposed,” he stressed.
“Now what we are talking about is sending (the ballots) by mail to everyone who appears in the voter registry, when everyone knows that these lists are imprecise,” the attorney general stressed, without offering any evidence of these claims.
