Trump Supports Expanding Election Day to Multiple Days and 'Opening More Voting Booths'
President Donald Trump backed the idea of expanding the number of days people can vote in the November election, while voicing support for adding more polling locations to ensure people can properly socially distance and safely cast their ballots.
Trump has repeatedly disparaged nationwide efforts to expand access to mail-in voting ahead of the November election, as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to spread rapidly across the country. He repeated these concerns in a Monday interview with Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, but said he'd support expanding access to polling locations and back voting on multiple days.
"Would you be open to doing anything different than November 3rd? Would you be open to November 2nd? Would you be open to voting through the weekend to give people a chance to socially distance? Would you support more locations? National Guard working? Would you sit down and try to work some adjustments in?" Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade asked the president during the live phone interview.
"Yeah," Trump replied. "I would support all of that. That's what you want to do. And people—you know we voted during World War I. We voted during World War II. We voted during many crises. I mean, we voted like nobody would believe. We never had a problem. Now we have problems," he said.
"I would be open to opening more voting booths, where people actually come in and they say 'hey, here's where I live and I live in the state,'" Trump said.
Prior to that question, Trump also suggested he would be fine with many Americans mailing-in absentee ballots if they certified that they were doing so because of concerns about COVID-19.
"Would you support someone writing in a request for a ballot and having said 'my reason: concerned about COVID,' would that be something you accept?" Kilmeade asked.
"I totally support that. That's called absentee ballot Brian. That's a great thing," Trump said.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for further comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The president's remarks about the election come after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, called representatives back into session this week to vote on legislation to bolster the U.S. Postal Service. The decision came as many across the country have raised concerns that the president is attempting to undermine the federal agency to suppress votes in November.
"Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the President's campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters," Pelosi said in a Sunday letter to House Democrats.
Trump insisted to Fox & Friends that changes at the Postal Service are intended to make it run better and support workers. "I want to make the post office great again," he said. However, the president repeated his complaints about mail-in voting, and argued that expanding access to mail-in ballots will lead to widespread voter fraud.
Multiple Republican and Democratic election officials have repeatedly said that mail-in and absentee voting is secure and not prone to fraud
"You're never going to have a fair election," Trump said. However, the president later differentiated between mail-in ballots and absentee ballots, which he has used on multiple occasions and is planning to use again in November. Although Trump and many of his supporters have argued that absentee voting is different than mail-in voting, election experts have pointed out that there is not a significant difference between the two.
Many states across the country already hold early in-person voting. For example, Arizona allows early in-person voting up to 27 days before the election, ending the Friday ahead of election day. California allows this to happen 29 days before the election, but the availability varies by county. Michigan allows it even longer, starting 45 days ahead of November 3 by voters filling in an absentee ballot at their polling location.
