SETTING IT STRAIGHT

Jimmy Carter, Cited by White House in Mail-In Voting Attacks, Says He’s Voted by Mail for Years

The Trump administration has recently been citing the former president to back up their attempts to discredit absentee voting.

Attorney General William Barr and the White House have recently been citing former President Jimmy Carter’s years-old work studying absentee ballots to back up their attempts to discredit the voting method. But that has now been slightly undermined by Carter himself, who says he is actually fully in favor of mail-in voting—and has in fact been using it for the past five years. Barr and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany have used part of Carter’s findings from a mail-voting commission in 2005 to argue that absentee ballots are more susceptible to fraud. However, according to CNN, Carter believes his work is being misrepresented by them. The former president said his work argued that “where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place... there was little evidence of voter fraud.” In a statement Thursday, the former Democratic president said: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”