President Donald Trump’s blatant hypocrisy over mail-in voting is not lost among even members of his own base.
Michelle Hall, a Republican voter in Florida, told CNN’s Randi Kaye on Tuesday that she was astounded to hear Trump, 79, had voted by mail in a special election for Florida’s state legislature on Tuesday, despite him having railed against the practice as “mail-in cheating” just the day before.
“Are you kidding me? I had no idea,” Hall said. “Voting by mail, to me, is terrible, unless you have a disability.”
“So do you think President Trump shouldn’t have voted by mail?” Kaye asked.
“Correct. I think he shouldn’t have,” Hall affirmed. “If he’s against something, why are you doing it?”
The president has been registered to vote at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, since Oct. 30, 2019, and cast a mail-in ballot for Tuesday’s special election, according to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website. An elections office spokesperson confirmed to The Washington Post that the information on the site was accurate.
Trump spent the last two weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and early in-person voting was accessible through Sunday, meaning he could have voted in person if he wanted to.
On Monday, the president blasted mail-in voting in further attempts to garner support for the SAVE America Act, which would prohibit most voting by mail and require citizens to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
The measure, if passed, could potentially block millions of Americans who don’t have easy access to necessary documentation from voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump said on Monday. “I call it ‘mail-in cheating,’ and we’ve got to do something about it.
The president has voted by mail in elections going back to at least 2020, according to NPR.
Reached for comment, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told the Daily Beast in a statement: “As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel – but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud. As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story.”
The White House did not immediately respond when pressed on why the president didn’t vote early in person when he was at Mar-a-Lago the last two weekends.
Democrat Emily Gregory defeated Republican Jon Maples in Tuesday’s special election for the State House 87 seat, flipping a deep red district that includes Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, blue.
