Stumping in Colorado this weekend, Donald Trump said he was “skeptical” of the state’s voting system, and flirted with the suggestion that his supporters should vote more than once.
Trump frequently claims the presidential election is “rigged” against him and warns about the threat of voter fraud, which is extremely rare in the United States.
But in Colorado the candidate’s own words, perhaps unintentionally, could be construed as calling for voter fraud.
Colorado voters automatically get mail-in ballots. “Do you think those ballots are properly counted?” Trump asked the audience at a rally in Greeley on Sunday night. “I know they are saying, ‘Oh, of course, it’s all legitimate.’ Perhaps I’m a more skeptical person.”
He urged supporters to get a “new ballot” at their polling locations.
“They’ll give you a ballot, a new ballot. They’ll void your old ballot, they will give you a new ballot. And you can go out and make sure it gets in,” Trump said.
In fact, voters are only allowed to request a new ballot if they have not yet submitted their mail-in ballots, according to Colorado officials. Trump doesn’t appear to be calling for both votes to be counted, but it doesn’t matter—a mail-in vote cannot be voided or changed once it has been submitted.
Trump added, somewhat cryptically: “In some places they probably do that four or five times. We don’t do that. But that’s great.”
Colorado officials say that voting in the state is carefully monitored, and that the system is difficult to game.
Meanwhile, a woman in Iowa was charged with fraud last week, and faces up to five years in prison for voting for Trump twice. She said she was scared of her vote being changed to support Hillary Clinton. “The polls are rigged,” she said, according to Iowa Public Radio.