President Donald Trump levied a claim Democrats' push to close schools is an aim at suppressing in-person voting at polling booths at schools this November – all amid the massive push for universal mail-in voting.
"Some people say they don't want – the Democrats don't want – schools open because that's where you have a lot of polling booths," Trump told reporters at the daily press briefing Thursday.
"And if you have a school closed, you can't very easily have polling booths at the school."
Trump said his administration is looking at this movement as potential voter suppression.
"And that's because, I think, maybe we will be able to show that as fact," Trump said. "But that's another thing that they're doing to try and keep people away from the polls. So, we have to look into that, and you've been reading about it, I've been reading about it, and I don't like it.
"But, we'd like to see the schools open and then we don't have that problem."
Trump has faced heavy criticism for his push for American kids to get back to school, particularly so their parents can get back to work.
"You know we don't want the schools shut down," Trump said. "We want the schools to open.
"We are finding that whether it's parents or children, people want to get back to school. They want to have their life back."
Trump also continued his rebuke of universal mail-in voting, particularly in locales that are not prepared to handle massive mail-in balloting campaigns.
"Absentee ballots, by the way, are fine," Trump said. "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 what we are against."
Trump pointed to a number of contested primary elections that have been fraught with issues as the potential for "fraudulent" elections.
"The whole thing is a mess," Trump said.
"We have to have an honest election, and if it's not going to be an honest election, I guess people have to sit down and think really long and hard about it."
Trump hearkened back to the "old days" of in-person voting, which he reminded was just a couple of years ago.
"People will have to go to the polls and vote, like the old days, like two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, they have to go," he said.
"It doesn't say anybody is taking the vote away, but it means that the universal mail-ins don't work. Absentees do work. It's a very different thing, an absentee, where you make an application, you send it in, they send you a vote: It's different.
"I'm not saying anything wrong with voting. I want them to vote. But that would mean that they'd have to go to a voting booth like they used to and vote."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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