Fox News host Laura Ingraham gave former President Donald Trump a brutal reminder after he claimed "you automatically have fraud" with mail-in voting.
Ingraham countered Trump's argument by pointing out that Florida, where mail-in voting is implemented, delivered a significant victory for him in the 2020 election against President Joe Biden:
"Well, there's mail-in voting in Florida, where you won huge."
But Trump continued parroting the same lie he's pushed for years, speaking over her even she repeated "You won":
"When you have it, you're going to have fraud because... when you go into a voting place, like when you go into one in a properly run state, they look at you, you give voter ID, you give all sorts of identification. It'd be very hard to cheat on a mass scale."
You can watch their exchange in the video below.
The renewed focus on mail-in voting comes in the wake of a disappointing midterm election for Republicans. Party officials are intensifying efforts to shift voter attitudes toward mail-in balloting, actively encouraging Republican voters to request mail-in ballots and participate in early voting, a sharp pivot from Trump's claims it played a role in the alleged "fraud" that he falsely believes cost him the 2020 general election.
Not long after Trump's exchange with Ingraham, GOP consultant and pollster Frank Luntz gave Trump yet another awkward reminder: that Trump himself "voted by mail in the 2020 election."
People made note of Trump's hypocrisy.
Others pointed out that his statements would actually hurt his chances of triumphing in this year's election.
Republicans have railed against early voting and vote-by-mail procedures in recent years, spurred by Trump's lies that they helped Democrats "steal" the 2020 election.
Research shows early voting greatly increases voter turnout and a study from Stanford University’s Democracy and Polarization Lab published in April 2020 found that contrary to the widely-held belief among the GOP that vote-by-mail gives Democrats an advantage over Republicans, vote-by-mail options do not benefit one party more than another. Unless, of course, Republicans don't use those options.
But an angry Trump fueled conspiracies around voting procedures that have led to the disparity that currently exists with the early and absentee vote being dominated by Democrats and the same-day vote by Republicans.
For instance, Trump generated controversy ahead of the 2020 election when he attacked the process of mail-in voting by suggesting that people should instead send in their ballots before going to their polling places to see if their vote had been counted and then vote in person if their vote had not been tabulated.
However, no polling place works this way and in many states, the process of counting votes does not begin until polling places are officially closed on Election Day. Additionally, many states also have an online system that allows voters to check the status of their mail-in ballot and see if it's been received.
