President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign sued New Jersey on Tuesday over the state’s decision to let residents choose whether they want to mail in their ballots or vote in person.
Donald J. Trump for President, the New Jersey Republican State Committee, and the Republican National Committee filed the lawsuit asking the court to overrule Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order instituting the rules that would give voters an option to avoid voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic.
“In his haste, the governor created a system that will violate eligible citizens’ right to vote,” the lawsuit says. “By ordering universal vote-by-mail, he has created a recipe for disaster. Fraudulent and invalid votes dilute the votes of honest citizens and deprive them of their right to vote in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Trump has defended absentee voting and has used the system to vote in Florida, but he has repeatedly said expanding mail-in-voting will result in fraud.
Trump has also warned activists could double-count ballots, take ballots out of mailboxes, or print off their own ballots and sign them, all part of covert “Democrat meddling”:
Murphy announced the vote-by-mail plan last week to keep polling places closed to allegedly stop the spread of the coronavirus.
“We mailed ballots to folks who were registered in either party. We mailed applications to those who weren’t. And we also provided in-person voting capacity at least 50% in each county and at least one location in each municipality. It was a success. Not perfect, but overwhelmingly a success,” Murphy told CNN Friday.
Some polling places would still be open for people to cast written provisional ballots and not voting machines to protect duplicate votes.
Democrats claim vote-by-mail for the November election is necessary to protect people from the coronavirus. But Breitbart News reported recent data had not shown a compelling public health justification for vote-by-mail.
Wisconsin is one of the only U.S. states that held its primary election with in-person voting after the nation’s coronavirus lockdowns began.
Only a few dozen people at maximum were confirmed to have contracted the virus after participating either as voters or poll workers, and none of those cases were fatal. Out of the 413,000 participants, that equals an infection rate below two-hundredths of one percent.
Just days later, South Korea held national elections which did not result in any new coronavirus cases.
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