We begin today’s roundup with Matt Strieb at New York magazine who details Donald Trump’s baseless attacks on voting by mail:
Already, 45 states allow the kind of voting Trump considers dangerous, and in this majority there has been negligible levels of tampering and fraud. As for foreign interference, election law expert Rick Hasen told NBC News that interfering with mail ballots — compared to the relative ease of hacking in-person voting machines — would be “ridiculous,” considering the bounty of safeguards built into the process. “They would have to have accurate voter information including voter identifying information, such as signatures or the last four of people’s driver license numbers,” Hasen told NBC News. “There are just so many things that would make it obvious that these ballots would be fraudulent that such a scheme would be easily caught and deterred.”
And while Trump is excoriating the process in a clear attempt at suppressing the vote — which may have backfired in the primary earlier this month in Pennsylvania — he has surrounded himself in his campaign and administration with mail-in voters, among other “whacko and incompetent” staffers.
Here is a detailed factcheck of his lies:
"Ballots are built unique for each election. Each jurisdiction will normally have dozens to hundreds of unique ballot styles. Proofs for each ballot style are reviewed and tested to ensure the ballot scanners will read those ballots and only those ballots," Morrell said. "Even ballots created on that system from a previous election cannot be read."
At the Miami Herald, Republican Juan Carlos Planas also sets the record straight:
As a former Republican member of the Florida Legislature, whose parents fled political oppression, I am appalled that my community would tolerate such an attack on our voting rights.
Starting with the 2004 presidential election until the 2014 midterms, I was part of the Miami-Dade County Republican legal team in every election except 2010, and I led that team in support of John McCain in 2008. Since leaving office in 2010, I have practiced ethics and elections law all over the state. I have investigated, and even taken legal action in, several cases involving vote-by-mail ballots. [...]
Based on my 16 years of experience, I can assure voters that there is no merit to Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in mail ballots.
Meanwhile, the fallout from Trump’s failed rally and chaotic campaign continues. Details from Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay at The Daily Beast:
As Trump was on stage in Tulsa, his campaign filed its most recent financial report with the Federal Election Commission, revealing that it had brought in just under $25 million last month, well short of the nearly $37 million in receipts reported by the Biden campaign. The real concerns for the Trump campaign, though, were in the details. For the second time in three months, Biden’s campaign reported beating Trump’s in small dollar donations, both in terms of gross receipts—Biden more than tripled the $5.4 million that Trump brought in in May from donations of under $200—and as a share of total individual contributions. All told, 38.2 percent of individual donations to the Trump campaign in May came via contributions of less than $200, compared to 47.2 percent for Biden. [...]
Even as a coronavirus-induced recession hammered American pocketbooks, Biden’s small dollar fundraising has exploded. His campaign brought in nearly $20 million from donations of under $200 in March, according to its FEC filings. That was more than the Trump campaign has ever reported raising from small-dollar contributions in a single reporting period. And Biden has largely kept up the momentum. In March, an aide said, his average donation was $40; by April it was $32, and by May it was $30. The campaign had tripled the number of online donors since February.
David Graham at The Atlantic:
Five years ago this month, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump delivered one of the indelible images of 21st-century politics when he slowly descended a gold escalator to a rally announcing his candidacy for the presidency.
On Saturday, he delivered another iconic image, but not the sort he wanted to produce. Returning to the White House after a flop of a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump stepped off Marine One with his collar unbuttoned, his signature red tie undone and hanging loosely around his neck, and his MAGA hat crumpled in his hand. He waved listlessly to the cameras and gave a perfunctory thumbs-up.
On a final note, don’t miss Adam Entous at The New Yorker who sits down with Fiona Hill:
Hill found that not even Trump’s closest advisers could get his attention. Trump often did not appear in the Oval Office until 11:30 a.m. Typically, the first item on his schedule was the President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret summary of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence. “It was awful,” a former White House official told me. “He just rants and raves. It’s mostly about what was on Fox News. He really does believe that he knows more than the generals, more than the intelligence professionals.” Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, who had replaced Priebus, limited the P.D.B. sessions to three a week, to avoid wasting time. If Trump seemed to be in an especially foul mood, Kelly would cancel that day’s briefing.
