President Donald Trump said in passing remarks in an interview on Thursday that he intends to send law enforcement officers, and “hopefully U.S. attorneys” to help monitor the polling stations to prevent voter fraud during the November elections.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity late Thursday, Trump was asked, “Are you going to have poll-watchers, are you going to have an ability to monitor to avoid fraud and cross-check whether or not these are registered voters, whether or not theres been identification to know its a real vote from a real American?”
“Were going to have everything, were going to have sheriffs, and were going to have law enforcement. And were going to have hopefully U.S. attorneys, and were going to have everybody, and attorney generals,” Trump said, without expanding on how what he said would be carried out.
The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.
The president continued expressing his concerns to Hannity regarding the potential difficulty of ensuring the validity of votes in a universal mail-in voting situation, mentioning Nevada “where they dont even have to check the signatures so anybody can sign it” and New Jersey, where the governor had recently signed an executive order that “didnt even go through the legislature” to send ballots to all active registered voters in the state.
“Nobodys ever heard of anything like this,” he added. “So theyre going to be sending out 51 million ballots to people, they have no idea, why its coming, who its going to.” The president alleged that “unfortunately they may have a very good idea—the people sending them,” hypothesizing that “they may send them to all Democrat areas, not to Republican areas as an example. Could be the other way too, but I doubt it.”
Read MoreTrump Campaign Sues New Jersey Over Mail-in Ballots
Trump has repeatedly expressed his concern that universal mail-in ballots could lead to a surge in fraud.
He has also repeatedly made a distinction between universal mail-in voting and absentee voting.
“Absentee is great. Its been working for a long time, like in Florida. Absentee—you request, and it comes in, and then you send it back. Absentee is great, but universal is going to be a disaster, the likes of which our country has never seen,” he said earlier this week. “Itll end up being a rigged election, or they will never come out with an outcome. Theyll have to do it again. And nobody wants that, and I dont want that.”
Trump said on Aug. 16 that “the problem with the mail-in voting, number one, youre never going to know when the election is over.” He gave an example of the recent Democratic congressional primary election in New York where he said that the race should not have yet been _
