Pelosi to voters: Ignore Trump

As the GOP convention kicked off Monday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered a message to American voters: ignore President Trump.

“One thing I will say to the American people: Do not pay any attention to Donald Trump,” Pelosi said during an appearance on MSNBC. “It is his goal to scare people from voting, to intimidate them by saying he’s going to have law enforcement people at the polls, to welcome Russian intervention into our election by letting Putin decide who will be president instead of the American people.

“But ignore him,” she said, “because his purpose is to diminish the vote, to suppress the vote.”

The Speaker’s remarks came after she was asked about a new NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll revealing that only 45 percent of respondents said they would feel confident about votes being accurately counted in the November election. That was 14 points lower than how confident people said they felt about the results of the 2016 election.

Earlier in the day, Trump made his first appearance at the four-day Republican National Convention and continued to sow doubts about the reliability of mail-in voting. He argued that expanding access to mail-in ballots — due to the coronavirus pandemic — could lead to widespread voter fraud, even as experts say it is safe.

“Eighty million mail-in ballots they’re working on, sending them out to people that didn’t ask for them,” Trump, who was formally renominated, told supporters in Charlotte, N.C. “And it’s not fair and it’s not right, and it’s not going to be possible to tabulate, in my opinion.”

In the face of Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in voting, Pelosi and other Democrats have been trying to reassure the public that their vote will be counted if they vote by mail rather than at their polling stations.

“People are right to be concerned because the president of the United States is saying what he’s saying,” Pelosi told MSNBC from the Capitol, “but don’t pay any attention to him because that’s just a victory for those who want to have a lower turnout so that fewer people are engaged in the decision.”

Elsewhere in the Capitol, House Democrats on Monday grilled Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general and a Trump megadonor who has come under fire for implementing a series of cost-cutting reforms at the Postal Service that congressional Democrats and good-government groups say could disrupt mail-in voting in the presidential election.

DeJoy pushed back on Democrats’ suggestion that the reforms were political in nature and aimed at helping Trump in November, and noted that he himself planned to vote by mail.

“I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy told the lawmakers.