In the face of the global pandemic that's brought life in the United States to a standstill, states across the country have postponed their primaries to allow for voters to safely cast their ballots without contracting the virus.
One important way states are looking to ensure voters get to exercise their right to vote while also keeping safe is by expanding vote by mail absentee ballots, which voters send by mail, allowing them to comply with isolation measures and prevent the spread of the virus.
Republicans aren't down with absentee voting.
The state of Wisconsin—whose primary was on Tuesday—experienced a monumental surge in absentee ballot requests, leaving its election commission unable to fulfill all the requests in time for election day.
The Democratic National Committee argued that the absentee voting deadline should be extended until April 13, given the circumstances.
The Supreme Court's Republican majority disagreed, and forced Wisconsinites who had not received their absentee ballots to put themselves in harm's way in order to vote, or to give up their right to vote all together.
In a Tuesday press briefing on the virus, President Donald Trump was asked if he'd support measures to expand voting by mail, as other states are likely to face a similar predicament as Wisconsin.
Watch Trump's answer below.
Seconds after Trump said that mail-in voting was "horrible" and "corrupt," one White House correspondent pointed out that Trump—who became a Florida resident late last year—voted absentee in the state this month.
When asked how he reconciled that, Trump said:
"Because I'm allowed to...You know why I voted? Because I happened to be in the White House and I won't be able to go to Florida to vote. There's a big difference between somebody that's out of state and does a ballot and everything's sealed...and you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody's living room signing ballots all over the place. No, I think mail-in voting is a terrible thing. I think if you vote, you should go...you look at what they do where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it."
Umm, yeah.
Trump's hypocrisy, however, didn't do him any favors.
It might be unsurprising that Trump is against mail-in voting, because it's consistent with a greater Republican platform of voter suppression.
Trump's answer was foreboding to people who expect setbacks to occur ahead of the 2020 election.
Don't let him get away with it. Register to vote here.
For more information on voter suppression and totalitarianism, check out How Democracies Die, available here.
