President Donald Trump warned Thursday in Michigan of vote by mail pirates committing fraud.
“What we want is we want good straight honest voting,” Trump said during a roundtable with African American leaders on Thursday.
The president questioned whether or not a municipality could have honest voting in a vote by mail system, warning that activists could pirate absentee ballot applications coming through the mail.
“Who knows who’s signing it? Who knows if it ever gets to your house? Who knows that they don’t pirate?” he asked. “They pirate these applications, they print new voting forms and then they send them around. People sign them or one person signs them with different pens.”
Michigan announced Tuesday that they would use $4.5 million in federal funds from the CARES Act to send vote by mail absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million registered voters in the state.
Trump said that vote by mail was ripe for fraudulent activity.
“Obviously there’s going to be fraud. We’re not babies. There’s tremendous fraud,” he said.
The president also complained of ballot harvesting, accusing Democrat activists of dumping thousands of ballots at the end of a race.
“Harvesting, a wonderful thing, harvesting. They just happen to find thousands of ballots, just at the end,” Trump said.
Trump said that the ideal would be election laws with voting ID.
“You go and you vote, and ideally you vote with voter ID and then you really have an election,” Trump said.
But the president said that absentee voting by mail should be allowed for people who could not be present in their state or people who were sick.