That was Wednesday morning; Wednesday evening, he followed it up with this:

For the record, absentee ballots and mail ballots are, in fact, exactly the same thing. In some states, you have to have an excuse to get an absentee ballot; in others, all you have to do is request one.

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In five states, there are all-mail elections. But everywhere, if you’re voting absentee, the state mails you a ballot, you fill it out (usually verifying your identity with a signature that is checked against the one on file), and you mail it back.

Until this pandemic, when Democrats began pushing for everyone to be allowed to vote by mail to reduce reliance on crowded polling places, Republicans, both the elite and the rank-and-file, didn’t have much of a problem with absentee or mail voting. In fact, a new Reuters poll finds that 72 percent of adults, including 65 percent of Republicans, support a requirement for mail-in ballots to protect voters in the event of continued coronavirus spread.

And it’s not the case that mail balloting as it exists now benefits Democrats. As political scientist Charles Stewart III points out:

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First, in 2016 Democrats and Republicans availed themselves of mail ballots at roughly the same rates. Second, older voters are more likely to use mail ballots than younger voters — a demographic that has skewed Republican in recent years.

Among those who vote by mail is one older voter by the name of Donald J. Trump. When he said in Tuesday’s briefing, “I think mail-in voting is horrible,” a reporter then pointed out that Trump himself votes by mail, to which he responded, “Because I’m allowed to.”

In other words, there are good mail votes, which are cast by Republicans, and bad mail votes, which are cast by Democrats. That distinction will allow Trump’s supporters, millions of whom already vote by mail, to resolve the cognitive dissonance that this new campaign against mail voting will produce.

As he often does in cases like this, Trump has invented a fictional story to support his claim, but kept that story vague enough that it is impossible to literally disprove. That leaves journalists falling back on phraseology like “Trump offered no evidence to support this claim” to describe what is simply a lie.

So Trump tells of massive voter fraud operations committed by unnamed criminals (known only as “they”) through the mail: “You look at what they do, where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it.”

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Here’s another telling of the story from Wednesday’s briefing:

But they have to be very careful, because you know the things with bundling and all of the things that are happening with votes by mail where thousands of votes are gathered. And I’m not going to say which party does it, but thousands of votes are gathered and they come in and they’re dumped in a location, and then, all of a sudden, you lose elections if you think you’re going to win.

You know the things with the things, right? We can’t have those things. Because it’s so incoherent, it becomes immune to fact-checking, which relies on specific assertions of fact that can be checked.

But Republicans aren’t against mail voting per se; they just want to keep it from being offered to too many people. The travesty that just occurred in Wisconsin was, as far as Republicans are concerned, a perfect situation. There was a good amount of mail voting that likely worked to their benefit but excluded large numbers of Democratic voters, who were left to stand for hours in line after polling places in their neighborhoods were cut back. What could be better?

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We should be clear that fraud is theoretically possible with mail ballots. But it’s hard to do on a large scale, because paper can’t be hacked and you’d have to do it one ballot at a time. The states that have moved toward all-mail elections have had no significant problems with fraud.

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But now that Democrats are hoping states will allow anyone to vote by mail this November, Trump and his party have decided that it’s a dire threat to their prospects; as the speaker of the Georgia state House admitted, allowing everyone to vote by mail would increase turnout, and that “will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

Recent experience has taught us that breakdowns in elections — impossibly long lines at polling places, large numbers of people finding themselves no longer on the rolls, and so on — seem to overwhelmingly hurt Democrats. That may not have been true at every moment in history, but it is now. So it’s likely that Trump sees what happened in Wisconsin and thinks, “Every election should be like that.”

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Chaos is what he’s after: He believes it will help him win, and if he still loses, he can use it as evidence that the election was rigged against him and it was therefore illegitimate. So the last thing he wants is to make voting too easy.

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