Trump Spends Months Warning That Mail-In Voting Invites Massive Fraud, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Americans Trusted The Method By Which The President Had Just Voted

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump devoted much of 2020 to a sustained public information campaign warning Americans that voting by mail, a practice several states had used without notable incident for years and one the President himself had relied upon that spring, would produce the most fraudulent election in the history of the republic.

The effort, which administration officials described as one of the year's signature undertakings, consisted of Trump repeatedly declaring on television, at briefings, and on Twitter that mail-in ballots invited cheating on a catastrophic scale. "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent," the President wrote on May 26, in a message that prompted Twitter to attach a fact-check label to his account for the first time, an intervention aides said only confirmed his point.

Election officials, including Republican secretaries of state in jurisdictions that had conducted all-mail elections for years, noted that documented fraud in mail voting was vanishingly rare. The President responded by drawing a careful distinction between "absentee" voting, which he said was honest and dignified and the method by which he and the First Lady had just cast their own ballots in Florida, and "mail-in" voting, which he said was a separate and sinister thing, a distinction election experts were unable to locate in any statute.

"The President has been very clear that the only secure ballot is the one he personally mails in," said one senior advisor, speaking on condition of anonymity because the distinction does not exist. "Everything else is a Trojan horse. We are simply asking voters to trust the process exactly as much as the President trusts it, which is to say right up until the moment the results come in."

Sources within the administration confirmed that the months of warnings were performing precisely as designed, having established, well in advance of a single vote being counted, a comprehensive explanation for any outcome other than victory. Political historians praised the initiative as an unusually candid act of forecasting, noting that the President had told the country exactly what he would say in November, and then in November said it.

At press time, Trump was reminding supporters that the coming election would be the most rigged in American history unless he won it, in which case it would be remembered as the cleanest.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who manufactured, months in advance and in his own voice, a ready-made explanation for losing an election he would go on to lose.
§The Trump 2020 reelection campaign, whose small-dollar fundraising operation found that warnings of a stolen election raised money faster than any policy ever had.
§The Republican National Committee, which paired the fraud narrative with a nationwide litigation effort to make voting by mail harder.
§Republican-aligned election lawyers and litigation groups, who gained a year of well-funded work filing suits against the practice.
§The eventual "Stop the Steal" movement, handed a fully constructed rationale before it had a name.
§Cable news networks, which converted each fresh warning into hours of programming.
§The Russian Federation and other foreign governments, whose longstanding interest in eroding public faith in American elections was advanced, at no cost to themselves, by the President of the United States.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment