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Donald Trump can’t make up his mind on early voting.
Both in and out of office, Trump attacked mail-in and other forms of early voting as suspect, illegal, and unreliable. At the same time, with polls showing him trailing Kamala Harris, Trump and his party have occasionally urged voters to take advantage of early voting.
That ambivalence continued on Monday night, when Trump spoke to a crowd in Indiana, Pennsylvania.
One moment, Trump was telling the crowd to vote early.
“We’re here today because early voting begins in Pennsylvania over the next two weeks, and we need each and every one of you to go out,” he said. “Just don’t take anything for granted.”
During the same speech, the former president dismissed early voting, used by 43 percent of voters in 2020, in a familiar negative light.
“Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early… I wonder what the hell happens during that 45?” Trump said, before repeating his usual baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
Such comments are surely a headache for the Republican National Committee, whose officials have been traveling around the country on a “Protect Your Vote” tour to encourage turnout, including early votes.
“The message from President Trump is very clear. It is great if you want to vote early,” RNC chair Maichael Whatley said during a tour stop in Tampa, Florida, this summer, adding “It is great if you want to vote by mail.”
That same day, Trump was on the news slamming vote-by-mail as fraud.
“Anytime you have mail-in voting, you’re going to have fraud and some people don’t like me saying it, but I say it,” Trump told Fox News.
While Trump regularly expresses baseless claims about early voting, other state officials have chimed in this election with more sincere questions.
Earlier this month, the National Association of Secretaries of State, a bipartisan group of election officials, wrote to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to describe their “ongoing concerns” about the postal system’s readiness for the upcoming election, pointing to “exceptionally long delivery times” for ballots and “higher than usual rates” of election mail being marked undeliverable.
"Let me be clear," DeJoy, a Trump appointee, said in a press conference last week. "The Postal Service is ready to deliver the nation’s mail-in ballots."
"We recognize that election officials are under an extreme amount of pressure, and will remain so for at least the next two months," DeJoy said. "We also recognize that the American public will become increasingly alarmed if there is ongoing dialogue that continues to question the reliability of the Postal Service for the upcoming elections."
