Sarah Sanders on election fraud: Don't forget people tried to delegitimize Trump's win
'The president wants to protect the integrity of the election,' says Sarah Sanders discussing Trump's concern over election fraud
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Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said on Thursday that President Trump is making the right move to raise the importance of election security amid the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that it was Democrats who tried to “delegitimize” the results of the 2016 election.
“These are unprecedented times and, certainly, there are going to be unprecedented measures that have to take place in order for people to be able to cast their ballot. At the same time, the president wants to make sure that we’re holding up the integrity of the election,” Sanders told “Outnumbered Overtime.”
Sanders said that there is much more opportunity for fraud when there are not as many “checks and balances” as available in an “in-person voting” process.
“The president simply wants to make sure we’re protecting the integrity of the election,” Sanders said.
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With the November election less than six months out and recent polling indicating flagging support for the president, Trump on Wednesday turned up the volume in his full-court press against the moves by some states to make voting by mail easier due to health concerns.
But the president’s attacks on Twitter against two crucial general election battleground states saw return fire, as top Democrats hit back against Trump’s repeated claims the past couple of months that an increase in balloting by mail will lead to a spike in voter fraud.
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The war of words was ignited early in the day as the president lashed out, tweeting, "Breaking: Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election. This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!"
But Trump mischaracterized the move made a day earlier, when Michigan’s secretary of state announced that absentee ballot applications would be sent to all of the state’s registered voters.
Hours later the president’s original tweet was deleted and replaced by a new tweet that said “absentee ballot applications” without mentioning his earlier mistake.
Sanders went on to say, “Let’s not forget that people came after the 2016 presidential election to take it away from him. They tried to delegitimize his very solid win and say that he was not the rightful winner and tried to create this whole illusion of the Russian hoax. There’s no question that the president should be focused on making sure nothing like that happens again, that our election security is protected and that we limit fraud as much as humanly possible.”
Michigan is one of three so-called "Rust Belt" states – along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – that the Democrats had carried in presidential elections for a quarter-century until Trump narrowly flipped them from blue to red in 2016. Recent polling in the state – including a Fox News survey – indicate presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has an advantage over Trump.
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Michigan changed its rules two years ago to allow anyone to vote by absentee ballot without an excuse, which helped boost absentee balloting in the March presidential primary from 18 percent four years ago to 38 percent this year. The state holds its non-presidential primary on Aug. 4, and then votes again for the general election in November.
Sending applications for an absentee ballot is different than sending ballots directly to all registered voters. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, speaking to reporters on Monday, said that “I don’t really have an issue with absentee ballot request forms being sent out to voters as much as ballots being sent directly to voters. I think the request form is one mechanism of ensuring that that voter is who they are.”
Fox News' Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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