Trump campaign official clashes with CNN host over president's lies about mail-in voting

On CNN Saturday, host Michael Smerconish pushed back on Trump campaign official Hogan Gidley for attacking the mail-in ballot system — and Gidley declined to explain what the president plans to do to prevent voter confusion.

Gidley focused particularly on the new Nevada vote-by-mail law that is currently the focus of a lawsuit by President Donald Trump, wrongly claiming that under this law, "anyone can wake up on Wednesday morning, see that they don't like the results and then go drop their ballots in the mail." (This is technically possible, but only if a city clerk misreads the postmark.)

"Let's see if we can agree on the next part — why focus on criminality?" asked Smerconish. "Old-fashioned government incompetence is clearly sufficient to create a mail vote debacle the country might come to regret in November. What is the administration doing about that?"

"But it's not an either-or, it's an and," said Gidley. "I mean, for decades, you don't trust the post office with a greeting card to granny. Now, you're telling them that the sacred vote that you're trying to cast for the president of the United States is going to go to the post office and we're going to trust that."

"But Hogan, five states have done this without any incident whatever," said Smerconish. "My complaint with the president is that when he lays this predicate for fraud, he's setting up a dynamic where Americans on November 3rd, are going to tune in looking at John King's magic wall and wondering hey, why don't we have a victor tonight? That's not indicative of fraud. It's indicative of people voting absentee in the midst of a pandemic, and the system not being able to count as normally as they did."

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