Trump appears confused about the differences between absentee ballots and vote-by-mail

President Donald Trump has apparently backtracked on Sunday, saying that he now supports absentee voting.

In the past, Trump has said that vote-by-mail is a scam and should be made illegal, but on Sunday, Trump said that he supports absentee voting, the method of voting by mail if someone can't make it to the polls on Election Day.

"Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them. Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election is USA history. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins. Just look at Special Election in Patterson, N.J. 19% of Ballots a FRAUD!" Trump tweeted.

When people want to vote by mail, they use an absentee ballot. There are some states that have gone to a mail-in-ballot system, but other states  have blocked vote-by-mail without an excuse. Currently, Texas is having a massive outbreak of COVID-19 and has suffered 16-straight days of record hospitalizations.

Trump freaked out when he learned that Michigan would encourage a vote-by-mail system for November. The state sent applications to voters so that they could apply for an absentee ballot if they didn't feel safe going to the polls. Trump seemed confused, seemingly appearing to think that the ballots were being sent to people in the mail not the applications. He went on to call it a fraud.

“You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” Trump ranted at a White House briefing in April.

The Republican Party has been pushing vote-by-mail to their supporters for years to ensure more of their hardcore voters cast ballots early and volunteer on Election Day. Trump claiming that somehow voting by mail was a scam had to have caused concern among many campaign operatives who have been pushing the method for decades. It's unclear if he's reversing his decision by saying absentee voting is nothing like vote-by-mail or he's merely confused.