Donald Trump is urging his supporters to commit a crime to undermine the elections, looking for yet another way to reject a loss he is clearly expecting—and once again, Attorney General William Barr is showing that he will never push back against even Trump’s most obviously illegal ideas. During a trip to North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump twice suggested that people should vote by mail and then attempt to also vote in person. Intentionally voting twice is a felony in North Carolina.
“Let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote,” Trump told reporters, before telling a group of supporters in Wilmington, North Carolina, the same thing.
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“So send it in early and then go and vote,” Trump told his supporters. “You can’t let them take your vote away; these people are playing dirty politics. So if you have an absentee ballot . . . you send it in, but I’d check it, follow it and go vote.”
”Trump’s suggestion that people should vote twice is one he has discussed privately with aides in recent weeks amid concerns he is depressing turnout among his supporters by raising alarms about the security of mail-in voting,” The New York Times reports. So … seemingly, the result of Trump’s aides getting through to him that it’s a problem to get his own supporters not to vote by mail is that he’s now trying to get them to vote twice? Which is, again, a felony in North Carolina and many other states, and illegal in all of them.
States do check these things, and do catch a small number of people trying to vote twice, usually unintentionally. But if Trump’s supporters take him up on this, it could create chaos, with voting lines made longer by belligerent Trump supporters trying to vote for a second time and more work for poll workers trying to prevent those people from double-voting. And chaos on Election Day is one of the things Trump is looking for.
Asked during a CNN interview about Trump’s advocacy of a crime, Barr dodged the question in the most Trump-friendly way he could, claiming he just didn’t know the specifics of North Carolina’s voting laws. As if one needs to know the language of the statute to know it’s illegal to intentionally try to vote twice. Barr then echoed Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in voting by mail, saying it’s “very open to fraud and coercion, is reckless and dangerous, and people are playing with fire.” This is a lie about a voting method with a very long track record of success, and it’s one Barr is telling because he is not an honest defender of equal justice for all but a partisan backing Trump’s every play.
Donald Trump will do anything he can to delegitimize this election, because he believes he’s going to lose. The best, maybe the only, way to keep his plan from working is to make sure Joe Biden wins by a huge, HUGE margin.
