Trump Blatantly Urges His Supporters In North Carolina To Commit A Felony By Voting Twice

Today, presidential voting kicked off and the first state to send out absentee ballot was North Carolina. Much to Trump's chagrin, 618,000 requested ballots went out today that's 16 times the number the state sent out at the same time four years ago. AP reported that "the requests came overwhelmingly from Democratic and independent voters, a reflection of a new partisan divide over mail voting... Democrats requested more than 326,000 ballots, and independents 192,000, while only 92,000 were sought by Republicans. Voters in the state can continue to request the ballots up until Oct. 27." Two days earlier, on Wednesday evening, Fox News released a new poll that shows Biden leading Trump-- albeit narrowly-- among likely voters in North Carolina by 4 points. This may have been depressing for Trump, who desperately needs North Carolina's 15 electoral votes if he's to have any hope at all of eking out any kind of path to victory in November.

Hours earlier, Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), in reference to Trump, told his own supporters that there is a "massive assault on the Post Office to sabotage the election" and that "We will have our hands full defending a November victory against every trick in the fascist playbook...These brutal times are trying to our souls." Maybe Trump saw it because he almost immediately reached for one of his most blatant proposals to his fans to help him sabotage the election yet.

Lauren Egan and Pete Williams of NBC News reported that while Stumping in North Carolina Trumo just urged his supporters to vote twice-- once by mail and once in person. That's illegal and I assume urging people to do so is also illegal. Egan and Williams noted that this is an escalation of "his attempts to cast confusion and doubt on the validity of the result."

Trump: "So let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system's as good as they say it is, then obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote... If it's as good as they say it is, then obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote. So that's the way it is. And that's what they should do."

Asked about Trump's comments during an interview later Wednesday on CNN, Attorney General William Barr argued that a 2005 bipartisan report on election reform found that mail-in voting is "fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion."

Asked why there have been no findings, however, of widespread fraud, Barr responded, "We haven't had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots that's being proposed."

Barr said he was unaware of the specific laws in North Carolina, and he did not respond directly to questions about Trump's earlier comments.

Trump made similar claims about mail-in ballots during his 2016 campaign, essentially encouraging his supporters to commit voter fraud.

While the House House scurried to explain that Trump didn't actually mean what he said and wasn't really urging his supporters in North Carolina to break any laws, he flew off to Pennsylvania, where he urged supporters there to also vote twice. "Sign your mail-in ballot, OK? You sign it and send it in and then you have to follow it. And if on Election Day or early voting, that is not tabulated and counted, you go vote. And if for some reason after that-- it shouldn’t take that long-- they’re not going to be able to tabulate it because you would have voted. But you have to make sure your vote counts, because the only way they are going to be able to beat us is by doing that kind of stuff."

We began with Jamie Raskin-- and we'll end with him as well. "Trump’s open-air invitation to his supporters to vote twice," he told me yesterday, "is a plan for massive criminal voter fraud and chaos at the polls to justify other offenses against American democracy. Every elected official in America must denounce this criminal solicitation by the President or be considered complicit by history in this conspiracy against our government and Constitution."