White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended her decade-long record of voting by mail, arguing Wednesday that her public opposition to expanding mail-in voting for other people is not incompatible with her personal use of mail-in ballots, CNBC informed.
“Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person,” McEnany told NBC News. “President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”
McEnany was responding to a story published Wednesday by The Tampa Bay Times, which reported that, according to state records, McEnany has voted in Florida using mail-in absentee ballots for over a decade.
A review of state records shows that McEnany has voted by absentee ballot every time she has voted since 2008, a total of 12 times, most recently this March in the 2020 presidential primary.
In addition to being an absentee voter herself, McEnany is also a high-profile defender of President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on expanding mail-in ballots.
McEnany’s claim on Wednesday that Democrats want to “expand mass mail-in voting without a reason” ignored the threat of the coronavirus, which has killed about 100,000 Americans in the past four months. In Washington, Republicans have loudly opposed state efforts to expand ballot access by mail in light of the coronavirus threat, and few more than Trump himself.
The standard justification for Republican opposition to voting by mail is that it presents opportunities for “voter fraud.” But voter fraud, while held up as a grave threat by some, is in reality so rare that research has repeatedly shown it plays no appreciable role in American elections.
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