Rove rips Nevada's universal mail-in balloting law, warns 'we are going to see the potential for fraud'

Nevada's new law requiring that all registered voters receive a mail-in ballot is an example of the "potential for fraud" cited by President Trump in recent weeks, Fox News contributor Karl Rove told "Bill Hemmer Reports" Tuesday.

Rove told host and Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts that Trump is not objecting to mail-in voting per se, which the former George W. Bush adviser said has been "part of the American election process for years, for decades, for over a century."

TRUMP VOWS LEGAL ACTION OVER NEVADA MAIL-IN VOTING PLAN

However, Rove added, the president does have a problem with situations like that in Nevada, where state officials "approved sending a ballot -- not an application, but a ballot -- to everybody on the voter list. This includes over 200,000 people in Clark County, Nevada -- Las Vegas, the biggest county in the state -- that the Democrat election chief says are inactive voters and that the post office has already told them don't live at that address anymore ..." he said.

"Now they put into state law that this will happen, that everybody on the voter registration list -- whether they voted in recent elections, like the last six or eight years, or not -- gets a ballot. Where that happens, we are going to see the potential for fraud."

Thousands of primary election ballots were sent out to inactive voters earlier this year by the Clark County Election Department and the envelopes piled up in post office trays, outside apartment complexes and on community bulletin boards in and around Las Vegas.

The excess ballots drew complaints from local residents, who worry that anyone could pick up a ballot off the street and cast a fraudulent vote, as well as from Republican Party officials in the state who see a nefarious motive behind the vote-by-mail system being employed by the Democrat-dominated Clark County Commission.

“What’s going to happen with these things, they’re not secured at all and there are thousands of them just sitting here,” Jenny Trobiani, a postal worker in Clark County who told Fox News in May that she has seen hundreds of ballots being mailed to inactive voters. “This just seems fraudulent to me, something stinks here."

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In May, Trump raised Nevada Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak's ire when he tweeted that Nevada wanted to "send out illegal vote-by-mail ballots [and] creat[e] a great voter fraud scenario."

"Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections," he said, adding that he would consider withholding federal funding to the state.

Sisolak responded that for Trump to "threaten federal funding in the midst of a pandemic over a state exercising its authority to run elections in a safe and legal manner is inappropriate and outrageous.”

That same month, Clark County Democratic Party Chairwoman Donna West argued to the Washington Post that disregarding inactive voters will "suppress the vote" adding that "thousands" of inactive voters cast votes in the 2016 presidential sweeps.

Fox News' Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.