[ News ] Trump will not stop interfering in the elections.

[S e u o n g]

Washington (CNN): President Donald Trump escalated his efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of the voting process, outright encouraging supporters to vote twice in a test of election security - which would be illegal.

In his latest assault on mail-in balloting, Trump on Wednesday suggested North Carolinians should try to vote in-person even after casting mail-in ballots. Election authorities responded Thursday by pointing out that trying to vote more than once breaches state law and that it is a felony for a voter to intend to commit fraud by casting more than one ballot.
"It is illegal to vote twice in an election," Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a message to voters.
"Attempting to vote twice in an election or soliciting someone to do so is also a violation of North Carolina law."

 

Trump's North Carolina furor was just one recent example of the administration apparently seeking to tilt the electoral playing field. Previously, it emerged that his Department of Homeland Security withheld an intelligence bulletin warning of a Russian plot to spread misinformation about Joe Biden's health, which mirrored the President's own attacks. The report, first revealed by ABC News, followed the Director of National Intelligence's decision to stop in-person lawmaker briefings about election interference - a move Democrats say could shield foreign actors who want to help Trump.
If the story of the 2016 election was a broad meddling operation by a foreign power to favor Trump, the emerging story of the 2020 election increasingly appears to be an attempt by the President to use executive power to swing the election his way. There has never been a modern American election in which a President has so publicly and unashamedly tried to portray the sacred quadrennial exercise in democracy as corrupt.

Trump's attempt to discredit mail-in voting got a strong assist from Attorney General William Barr, who declared that changing to such a system would be "reckless and dangerous," in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.
"This is playing with fire. We're a very closely divided country here," Barr told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." Asked for evidence to defend his claim that foreign adversaries could dump large numbers of fraudulent mail-in ballots into the system, Barr told Blitzer: "Logic." US intelligence officials have said there is no evidence to suggest that the election could be threatened in such a manner. Barr also claimed that China, not Russia, was the most active foreign foe in interfering in the election. Last month, intelligence officials said that while Beijing wanted Trump to lose, Russia was making a far more aggressive attempt to hurt Biden.
Barr's comments will stir fresh concerns that he is acting as a political functionary for Trump rather than in the traditionally more neutral role expected of an attorney general. Such suspicions were provoked by the way he intervened to ease the political sting of the Mueller report and the probes he has set up apparently to discredit previous investigations into 2016 election interference.

 

An election that is already tainted
The President's effort to discredit the election is not limited to his false and frequent claims that mail-in voting - a reassuring option for many voters amid a pandemic that has killed more than 185,000 Americans so far - is stained by massive fraud. The President has warned that the election will be the most corrupt in US history and said, without evidence, that Americans may never know who won. He also threatened to send US attorneys and sheriffs to polling places to ensure there is no fraud, a tactic that would be construed as voter intimidation, especially among minority voters given grim historic echoes.
Trump has no reservations about using the authority of the presidency to mess with democracy. After all, he was impeached for an audacious attempt to coerce a foreign power - Ukraine - into intervening in the election to hurt Biden's campaign. And he has consistently rejected his own intelligence agencies' assessments that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help him - once, infamously at the side of President Vladimir Putin.