Video of then-businessman Donald Trump struggling to vote in-person before declaring he would fill out an absentee ballot in 2004 has resurfaced this week amid a new round of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting from the President.
The “Access Hollywood” segment, filmed as Trump was attempting to vote in the 2004 election, shows Trump alongside TV host Billy Bush visiting multiple New York City polling locations. Trump, however, is blocked from voting at each location because he is not on any of the voter rolls at each stop.
Trump can be seen becoming increasingly frustrated before declaring, “I’m going to fill out the absentee ballot.”The segment ends with Trump filling out what Bush describes as a provisional ballot in his car.”I just voted,” Trump touted. “At least you can say the Trumpster doesn’t give up.”
Yeah. Hullabaloo readers have known about this since 2016:
August 5, 2016: The Donald tries to vote (I was unable to download the video from Access Hollywood at the time.)
October 2, 2016: When Trump tried to fraudulently vote they wouldn’t let him
And just a couple of months ago:
Remember when Trump had trouble voting in 2004?
Published by digby on May 21, 2020
Access Hollywood got it all on tape.
Trump is making a big deal about vote by mail, insisting that it’s rife with fraud. It isn’t, of course. Many states have been providing this option for some time and some even do it entirely by mail now.
But whatever. My personal feeling is that he’s just setting up the “fraud” excuse in case he loses. He knows he can’t stop states from doing vote by mail. If he wins, he’ll just do what he did last time and say that he won in spite of a huge number of fraudulent Democratic votes. In fact, it was really a landslide!
Yesterday he said that voting in person is an “honor” and that the only people who should be allowed to vote absentee should be those who are sick or are not going to be in the state on election day.
I guess he doesn’t remember this:
I’d guess he forgot to register and so his absentee ballot wasn’t counted. Some Republicans would say people like him should be charged with voter fraud.
But by his reasoning he should never have been allowed to vote that year at all. He didn’t have an excuse for voting absentee. He just didn’t turn up on the rolls.
BTW: You’d think this would have “resurfaced” in the mainstream media in 2016 from the moment Trump started braying about voter fraud and a “rigged” election.