Did Trump vote by mail for Palm Beach municipal election? Former POTUS uses same system that he called 'fraud'
Former President Donald Trump has time and again asserted that the mail-in voting is rigged even though the FBI said last year that there was no “coordinated national voter fraud effort”. The year 2020 saw many Republican politicians and voters parrot the claims that if Trump lost the election, it would have been because of fraudulent mail-in votes. However, Trump seems to favor that very method when the time came for him to vote.
The Palm Beach Post reported that Trump, who is set to fulfill his civic duty as a private citizen and vote in the town of Palm Beach's municipal election, requested a mail ballot on Friday, March 5, for the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, his private club on Palm Beach. The report said that the request was made nearly a week after the deadline of February 27 to have a ballot be sent by mail. The completed ballot was received on Monday, March 8, ahead of Tuesday’s election.
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The Washington Post reported that it is likely that Trump had someone drop off his ballot for him at the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center, less than three miles from Mar-a-Lago. Palm Beach County elections chief Wendy Sartory Link said that as of Friday, March 5, her office issued 126,136 mail ballots, more than one-third of the 349,099 residents who are eligible to vote in the municipal elections.
Trump's hypocrisy on mail-in ballots
It is to be noted, however, that Trump, while demonizing mail-in ballots all throughout 2020, seemed to favor the system when it came to states run by Republicans. Trump tweeted last year, "Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True."
"Florida's Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida, I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail," implying that Republican-run states with existing mail-in voting programs were secure but that Democratic-led states establishing or expanding mail-in voting during the pandemic were not.
"So Florida's got a great Republican governor and it had a great Republican governor (before that) ... and over a long period of time, they've been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. Florida's different from other states," Trump said last year when asked about this blatant hypocrisy, before criticizing vote-by-mail efforts in Nevada and New York, which were led by Democratic governors.
However, as per reports, this is at least the third time Trump has voted by mail in recent years. The first time was in New York in 2018. It was then repeated in March 2020 for Florida’s primary.
In the past, Trump has claimed that “absentee ballots, by the way, are fine,” adding, “But the universal mail-ins that are just sent all over the place, where people can grab them and grab stacks of them, and sign them and do whatever you want, that’s the thing we’re against.” However, election experts have said that there is no real distinction between absentee ballots and voting by mail and the terms are often used interchangeably.