Trump Says Mail-In Voting Will Lead To ‘Rigged Election’ & Will Need ‘To Be Redone’

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that universal mail-in voting “is going to be a disaster the likes of which our country has never seen” and that it may mean the 2020 presidential election will have to be redone.

“The Democrats want to make it a political issue. It’s not a political issue, it’s really about a correct vote. You have to get voting right,” Trump said during his announcement of a posthumous pardon for women’s rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony. “You can’t have millions and millions of ballots sent all over the place, sent to people that are dead, sent to dogs, cats. Sent to everyone. This is a serious situation, this isn’t games, and you have to get it right.”

He continued: “I just want to get it right. Win, lose, or draw – I think I’m going to win – win, lose, or draw, we have to get it right. We have to have honest voting.”

Trump then differentiated between absentee voting, which is the way he personally votes in Florida, and mail-in voting.

“You can’t take millions of ballots, send them haphazardly all over the country, or all over a state, and expect it to come out properly,” Trump lamented. “By the way, absentee is great, it’s been working for a long time like in Florida. Absentee, you request and it comes in, and then you send it back. Absentee is great, but universal is going to be a disaster the likes of which our country has never seen.”

However, multiple fact checks found that the two are essentially the same thing.

“The differences between the two systems are trivial,” Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Florida, told FactCheck. “There is no rigid screening process that distinguishes the two methods of voting. Once registration and address are verified, the elections office will process the request and send the ballot. In Florida, almost 30% of votes in the last presidential election were cast by mail, and voters did not have to provide an excuse, be absent from the state, or go through an enhanced screening process. On this issue, Trump is simply wrong.”

Although the president has differentiated between the two terms, most of his criticism appears to target universal mail-in voting, in which all registered voters are automatically sent a ballot without having to request one.

“It’ll end up being a rigged election or they will never come out with an outcome,” Trump said. “They’ll have to do it again, and nobody wants that. And I don’t want that.”