WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump acknowledged Thursday that he's starving the U.S. Postal Service of money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots.
In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump noted two funding provisions that Democrats are seeking in a relief package that has stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he said, the Postal Service won't have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who are seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.
"If we don't make a deal, that means they don't get the money," Trump told host Maria Bartiromo. "That means they can't have universal mail-in voting. They just can't have it."
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said the agency is in a financially untenable position, but he maintains that it can handle this year's election mail.
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"Although there will likely be an unprecedented increase in election mail volume due to the pandemic, the Postal Service has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on-time in accordance with our delivery standards, and we will do so," he told the Postal Service's governing board last week.
Later Thursday, Trump told reporters at the White House that he would not veto legislation that has funding for the Postal Service, but added that "the reason the post office needs that much money is they have all of these millions of ballots coming in from nowhere and nobody knows from where and where they're going."
"We want to have an accurate vote," the president continued. "I'm not doing this for any reason."
Trump's statements, including the claim that Democrats are seeking universal mail-in voting, come as he faces a November matchup against Joe Biden. He's pairing the tough Postal Service stance in congressional negotiations with an increasingly robust mail-in-voting legal fight in states that could decide the election.
In Iowa, which Trump won handily in 2016 but is more competitive this year, his campaign joined a lawsuit Wednesday against two Democratic-leaning counties in an effort to invalidate tens of thousands of voters' absentee ballot applications.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, last month told auditors in an emergency election directive that request forms mailed to voters must be blank in order "to ensure uniformity."
Pate's office has not taken any legal action to block the two counties' mailings but said Thursday that it is investigating their actions. Pate said sending forms pre-filled with personal identifying information will give critics of absentee voting "an opportunity to question the validity of election results in those counties."
The GOP lawsuits argue that the auditors are violating Pate's directive by prepopulating the forms and that any ballots cast in response to the mailings may be subject to legal challenge.
A judge scheduled a hearing Monday on Trump's request for a temporary injunction.
That followed legal maneuvers in battleground Pennsylvania, where the campaign hopes to force changes in how the state collects and counts mail-in ballots.
The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee sued Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and local election boards on June 29 over their plan for mail-in balloting. Trump's team claimed that the plan "provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos."
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh on Thursday asked the campaign to put forward previous examples of such fraud. "Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much," said Ranjan, who was appointed by Trump and took his seat on the bench in August 2019. He gave the campaign until today.
In Nevada, Trump is challenging a law sending ballots to all active voters.
In Rhode Island, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed Republicans who challenged an agreement allowing residents to vote by mail through November's general election without getting signatures from two witnesses or a notary.
Rhode Island officials had agreed to suspend the witness requirement, which has been in place since at least 1978, because of the pandemic.
RELIEF PACKAGE
Meanwhile, negotiations over a new virus relief package have stalled. While there is some common ground over $100 billion for schools and new funds for virus testing, Democrats also want other emergency funds that Trump rejects, which includes more funding for the Postal Service.
"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That's election money, basically," Trump said during Thursday's call-in interview.
Appearing on CNBC on Thursday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow criticized Democrats for their election-related funding demands.
"So much of the Democratic 'asks' are really liberal, left wish lists -- you know, voting rights and aid to aliens and so forth. That's not our game, and the president can't accept that kind of deal," he said.
Asked whether he considered "voting rights" a partisan issue, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said: "Anytime you talk about getting greater access to vote ... that should be a bipartisan issue."
"Everyone agrees that we want people to vote, and we want them to have access to the ballot. We've worked hard to make that happen in Arkansas. Certainly, there's always differences of opinion as to how you get there and how you achieve that result," Hutchinson said. "That's what the legislative process is about. But we approach that in a bipartisan way in Arkansas, and I think that's how we ought to approach ballot access and access to the voters."
Democrats have pushed for a total of $10 billion for the Postal Service in talks with Republicans on the covid-19 response bill. That figure, which would include money to help with election mail, is down from a $25 billion plan in a House-passed coronavirus measure.
Judy Beard, legislative and political director for the American Postal Workers Union, said postal workers are up to the task of delivering mail-in ballots this year.
"We definitely know that the president is absolutely wrong concerning vote-by-mail," she said.
"The president admits his motive for holding USPS funding hostage is that he doesn't want Americans to vote by mail," U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., chairman of the House subcommittee on government operations, said in a statement Thursday. "Why? It hurts his electoral chances. He's putting self-preservation ahead of public safety, for an election he deserves to lose."
POSTELECTION STRATEGY
The Republican National Committee and conservative groups are pursuing efforts to limit expansion of mail balloting before the November election, spending tens of millions of dollars on lawsuits and advertising aimed at restricting who receives ballots and who remains on the voter rolls.
The party is also working to train as many as 35,000 poll-watchers to monitor in-person voting and ballot counting, mostly in key battleground states.
And the RNC and Trump campaign advisers are now mapping out their post-election strategy, including how to challenge mail ballots that lack postmarks, as they anticipate weekslong legal fights in an array of states, according to people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
The campaign plans to have lawyers ready to mobilize in every state and expects legal battles could play out after Election Day in such states as Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Nevada, they said.
Trump's claims about voting by mail have been echoed by Attorney General William Barr, who has said that mail-in voting could lead to a "high risk" of fraud and interference by foreign countries.
Trump's remarks Thursday prompted swift outcry from Democrats and even some Republicans, while voting-rights advocates denounced what they described as an unprecedented threat by a sitting president to undermine the election for his own political benefit.
"The president is afraid of the American people," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "He's been afraid for a while. He knows that, on the legit, it'd be hard for him to win."
Biden said it was "Pure Trump. He doesn't want an election."
'LINE IN SAND'
Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, described Trump's statements as a "line in the sand" that Congress must not let him cross.
U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., has indicated his support for some additional money to help the states carry out the vote during the pandemic.
U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who once oversaw the state's elections systems as secretary of state, said Thursday that he was not concerned about fraud in the election.
"That just doesn't happen to the degree that a lot of people seem to think it does," he said, adding that election administrators are "a very able and honorable group of public servants and usually have operations that are above reproach."
Roxanna Moritz, the auditor and commissioner of elections in Scott County, Iowa, said she may have to choose between offering early-voting satellite locations and paying for a second or even third round of mailing voters absentee ballot request forms.
Moritz said she doesn't understand the president's position on mail balloting, given how many Republicans are also likely to vote absentee.
"At some point in time, the Trump administration or the Republican Party is going to have to realize that if there are 60 to 75% of people voting by mail, those are their voters, too," she said.
In a letter to postal workers Thursday obtained by The Post, DeJoy said he remains committed to returning the Postal Service to solvency but also said he intends to protect service for the fall election.
He confirmed recent reports of delivery delays but called them "unintended consequences" of shifts that ultimately will improve service. We are working feverishly to stabilize this," he said, adding: "This will increase our performance for the election and upcoming peak season, and maintain the high level of public trust we have earned for dedication and commitment to our customers throughout our history."
Trump told reporters Thursday that he would not tell DeJoy to reverse changes that have slowed the mail, saying, "I want the post office to run properly."
Campaign officials, meanwhile, have said Trump is opposed only to universal mail balloting -- states that send actual ballots to all registered voters.
Information for this article was contributed by Deb Riechmann, Jessica Gresko, Ryan J. Foley and Anthony Izaguirre of The Associated Press; by Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Paul Kane, Erica Werner, Jacob Bogage, Elise Viebeck, Rachael Bade and Felicia Sonmez of The Washington Post; by Bob Van Voris of Bloomberg News; and by Frank E. Lockwood of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
