Vice President Mike Pence and his wife reportedly voted in April using a ballot system blasted by President Donald Trump as corrupt — mail-in voting.
Pence, whose voting record was exposed Monday by Business Insider, joins a long list of White House and Trump campaign officials and Trump family members who have voted by mail. That includes the president, who on Monday criticized mail-in ballots as the “scandal of our times!”
Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, used the address of the Indiana governor’s mansion for their mail-in ballot, according to the Insider. The couple hasn’t lived there for four years since Pence left the governor’s office in 2016. It’s not illegal to use a former address, as long as they don’t also register in Washington, D.C.
The news comes as Trump declared Monday that “millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries” and the 2020 election will be “RIGGED.”
Some critics have accused the president of attacking the ballots — which are good enough for him — as part of a Plan B if he’s voted out of the White House. They’re convinced he would declare the election invalid and refuse to leave the White House.
“I think this is a setup, I think they’re going to lose the election,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said Monday on CNN.
“I think they’re going to claim fraud, and they’re going to go back to these states with the mail-in voting and they’re going to use that as an argument. I just hope they don’t do that.” (Check out the video above.)
Trump initially claimed that ballots would be stolen wholesale from mailboxes. Now he’s insisting foreign nations send in fake ballots. He hasn’t presented any evidence for either claim.
State voting records reveal that Attorney General William Barr also voted by mail in 2012 and 2019, The Washington Post reported.
Yet on Monday, Barr said twice on Fox News that mail-in voting for other Americans would open the “floodgates of potential fraud.” He also claimed foreign countries could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots.
Trump has voted absentee at least three times — in New York City’s 2017 mayoral election, the state’s midterm election in 2018 and in Florida’s primary election in 2020.
First lady Melania Trump, Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, attempted to cast absentee ballots in the 2017 mayoral election. But their votes weren’t counted. The first lady forgot to sign her ballot, the first daughter missed the return deadline and Kushner failed to send his back, The New York Daily News reported at the time.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has also used the mail to vote — and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany voted 11 times in 10 years by mail, The Tampa Bay Times reported. Both McEnany — and Trump— may have voted by mail illegally because they used addresses that were not their actual residences, a HuffPost investigation found.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, have also voted by mail, The Associated Press reported Monday.
DeVos has permanent absentee voting rights, according to AP. Parscale skipped voting in the general election in 2016 when Trump ran for the presidency because he missed the deadline for an absentee ballot, he told CBS News.
“These are people who are taking advantage of — which is perfectly legal — their right to vote absentee,” Trevor Potter, the president of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, told AP. “But they don’t want other people to do the same thing.”
Pence’s office did not immediately return HuffPost’s requests to comment on his use of mail-in ballots. Spokesman Devin O’Malley told Business Insider that the Indiana Constitution allows for elected officials to vote via absentee ballot while serving in an official capacity.
