White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Sunday vowed President Donald Trump won’t interfere with anyone voting “in a legitimate way,” but insisted states aiming to make universal mail-in voting available this fall “just won’t work.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Meadows reinforced Trump’s suggestion of widespread mail-in voting fraud, despite a lack of evidence.
“The President of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their vote in a legitimate way, whether it’s the Post Office or anything else,” he said.
“This is more about states trying to recreate how they get their ballots and they're trying to do it on a compressed time line that just won't work,” he asserted.
But Trump isn’t off-base with his suspicions of fraudulent voting by mail, according to Meadows.
“There's no evidence that there's not [fraud] either,” he argued. “That's the definition of fraud.”
Meadows pointed to New York state’s “debacle” with mail-in votes in the primary race of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y. The vote counting took six weeks.
“Can you imagine if we had a presidential election that went on for weeks and weeks and months and months without a decision just because we have all this litigation and say, well, we've got to wait another week for ballots?” Meadows said.
“All the delays in the election with Carolyn Maloney and all the others, that wasn't a postal system,” he added. “That was an election process. We had six or seven weeks trying to count these votes. It wasn't because the ballots were necessarily in some letter carrier's pallets. The president is right in addressing this.”
Meadows also vowed no postal sorting machines will be taken off line “between now and the election.”
“The normal process of taking them out are really about regearing because we're seeing an increase in parcels, a decrease in mail volume,” he said. “And what I'm saying is a sorting machine to handle 100 million ballots, it’s like a gnat on an elephant's back. It's not going to matter with 8.6 billion pieces of mail going through the Postal Service every year.”
CNN obtained federal documents last week that indicated 671 machines used to organize letters or other pieces of mail are slated for "reduction" in dozens of cities this year.
The USPS's own document calls the move a "reduction" of equipment, CNN reported.
A letter sent Wednesday from the National Postal Mail Handlers Union to the Postal Service headquarters asked, "Why are these machines being removed?"
On Friday, the postal service warned nearly all 50 states and Washington, DC, that mail-in ballots may not be received by election offices in time to be counted.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's administration has slowed delivery, removed high-speed letter sorters from commission and issued a stark warning to election officials that mail-in ballots will no longer automatically be moved as priority mail.
The USPS also has started reducing post office operating hours across several states, cut overtime for postal workers and removed some of their iconic blue letter collection boxes.
The agency's inspector general is now reviewing these policy changes, according to CNN. Democrats are amping up demands that DeJoy rescind his changes and get the agency ready for the flood of mail-in ballots necessitated by the pandemic.
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