President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening signed an executive order focused on election integrity, including a measure to ensure that mail-in ballots are sent to eligible voters and returned by them.
Trump signed the order in the Oval Office while flanked by White House staff secretary Will Scharf and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese first reported that Trump was set to sign the order.
Scharf detailed the measures ahead of the signing.
“We’re going to take federal data, we’re going to ensure that each state’s election officials are provided with a comprehensive view of who the eligible voters in their jurisdiction actually are, allowing them to properly verify that everybody voting in their elections is legally able to vote,’ Scharf said of the first measure.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, in tandem with the Social Security Administration, is tasked with establishing “State Citizenship Lists” for each state. The lists will include U.S. citizens residing in that state who will be at least 18 at the time of the next federal election.
Scharf noted the order also directs “the postmaster general, the U.S. Postal Service, to take bold new measures to verify that ballots, both being sent to people, are being sent to people who are eligible to vote, and then the ballots being returned are being properly returned by eligible voters only.”
Scharf said the order cracks down on election “abuses” of the past.
“We believe that combined, the measures in this executive order will help secure elections in the future and ensure that the many abuses of our election system in the past aren’t repeated in future elections,” he said.
Lutnick said that barcodes on mail-in ballots are among the measures the postmaster is directed to implement.
“The states, right, run these elections. If they want to use the… U.S. Postal Service, they’re going to get a code, a barcode from the U.S. Postal Service, and they’re going to put that on the envelope, and we will have one envelope per vote,” he said.
Lutnick said the government will be able to verify the number of barcodes to ballots received.
Trump asserted that Democrats like mail-in ballots because they seek to use them for “cheating because their policy is so bad.”
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