President Donald Trump on Aug. 4 pointed to the groundwork established during the terms of two Republican governors to explain why he backs mail-in ballots—absentee voting—in Florida.
After months of vehement opposition to mail-in voting, Trump recommended that people vote by mail in Florida, saying that the Sunshine state has worked out a “very good” system over many years.
Trump’s recommendation, where people request ballots, is not the same as the concept of universal mail-in-voting, where ballots are automatically sent out. Florida lawmakers changed the legal wording from “absentee” to “vote-by-mail” in 2016, since voters weren’t required to be away from home to cast their ballot. Florida voters must request a mail-in ballot in order to receive one.
“So Florida has got a great Republican governor, and it had a great Republican governor. It’s got Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott—two great governors. And over a long period of time, they’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. Florida is different from other states,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing.
“So, in the case of Florida, they’ve done a great job and they’ve had tremendous success with it. But they’ve been doing this over many years, and they’ve made it really terrific,” the president added.
In 2018, Trump had repeatedly criticized the management of the election in Florida’s Broward County, calling it “an embarrassment to our Country and to Democracy!”
Trump compared the Florida system to the one established in Nevada on Aug. 3, just three days after Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) called an emergency session to rush through a mail-in voting measure.
“I mean, in Nevada, where you have a governor—he said, ‘Let’s just send out millions of ballots,’ and the Post Office cannot be prepared; I haven’t spoken to the Post Office about it, but I don’t know how they could possibly be prepared,” the president said.
Trump threatened to sue Nevada over the mail-in voting measure, which includes a provision that hands the power to manage an election in case of an emergency to the governor, rather than the secretary of state.
“It could be decided many months later,” Trump said. “Do you know why? Because lots of things will happen during that period of time. Especially when you have tight margins, lots of things can happen. There’s never been anything like this.”
