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Hot on the heels of a visit with his favorite strongman, President Trump burped up some incoherent and unconstitutional thoughts on election administration and the scope of his authority.
Immediately after meeting with Putin in Alaska last Friday, Trump gushed to Sean Hannity about how his authoritarian buddy totally agrees with him.
“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”
“We talked about 2020. He said, ‘You won that election by so much … you lost it because of mail-in voting.’ It was a rigged election.”
Trump clearly remains fixated on his loss to Joe Biden, and Putin is more than happy to rub his sores. So now Trump is going to try to get rid of voting machines and mail-in voting — and maybe federalism while he’s at it.
Literally every credible source imaginable that has reviewed the 2020 election has found that there was no widespread voter fraud, no hacked voting machines, no trove of fake mail-in ballots, no vast anti-Trump conspiracy. But why should Trump listen to cybersecurity experts or elections officials or dozens of judges when he’s got Putin?
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Despite what Trump says, it takes approximately 10 seconds with Google to find out that 34 countries also have mail-in voting, including several democracies in Western Europe, like the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany.
Russia does not, but somehow the absence of mail-in voting has not resulted in honest elections there. Instead, the Kremlin controls who is allowed to run against Putin, while candidates who oppose him are barred from the ballot. And of course Putin’s leading critics have a nasty habit of turning up dead, making running a viable campaign a bit difficult. Putin has also managed to rule Russia for 25 years straight by changing the constitution when necessary to give his dictatorship a veneer of legality.
In Russia’s sham elections, Putin isn’t just guaranteed to win — he’s guaranteed to win via huge landslides.
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