Thursday during an interview with CNN analyst David Axelrod on his podcast “The Axe Files,” former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D) accused President Donald Trump of being “afraid” of vote-by-mail because she argued it would “increase turnout and show that Trump was “illegitimate” and “should not hold office.”

Abrams said, “What’s happened in the last twenty years has been an acceleration by the right to constrict access to the vote because they no longer believe they can persuade the demographic majority of the country to agree with their ideas. So let’s start with that as a baseline. What we face with COVID-19 is an exacerbation of but also a concentration of the challenge that we face in this country the challenge that voters in Georgia faced in 2018, the voters in Ohio and Wisconsin and Florida have continually faced. And that is an artificial attempt to break the connection between being a citizen and having the right to express your views and choose your leaders.”

She continued, “We are pushing for in the vote by mail compulsion that we are trying to push up, that we are hearing that we need in the next CARES package is this, vote by mail is one way to ensure that we have safe, accessible voting and it is coupled with voting in person. There is no legitimate reason to remove both unless you are a state that has been doing this so long you have solved the issues of mass in-person voting. So instead, what we have is that we have to imagine a hundred people crowding into a polling place on Election Day were some number of those people may or may or be asymptomatic and where COVID has not gone. The goal is to get at least 75 percent of those people out of line. Get 75% of them out of line, and the way to accomplish that is to allow them to vote by mail. Every state in our nation has the capacity for vote-by-mail. The issue is making sure it is affordable and that the excuses are lifted, the requirements for excuses are lifted by the states who limit who has access. Of the remaining 25%, you want at least 10 of them to vote early because if you can spread out timing, then you can limit the likelihood that they are going to infect one another, and you can limit the number of personnel that you need in order to serve them. So by the time you get to election day, the only people who need to be voting in person are those who have no other choice.”

She added, “When Donald Trump says he doesn’t like vote by mail, he says it despite the fact that he has used it himself. And he dislikes it despite the fact that there is no evidence of fraud. We have had this form of voting for decades. The challenge that he sees is that it will increase the likelihood of those that are confined to home actually using that time to participate in the election. And anytime a leader is afraid of people speaking their minds and making their selections, he is illegitimate and should not hold office.”

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