Richard L. Hasen writes:

President Donald Trump on Thursday repeated his encouragement to his supporters to vote twice, first by mail and then—if election officials allow—in person. Voting twice—as the president requests—is not only illegal, but a recipe for chaos in November. Perhaps that is exactly the point. Trump defended his call as a way to test the system against voter fraud, but it’s like encouraging his supporters to try to rob the 7-Eleven to make sure that the police can respond adequately to robberies.

Speaking briefly to WECT television in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Trump said the following when he was asked if he was confident in North Carolina’s system of allowing people to vote absentee:

They’ll go out and they’ll vote and then they’re going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll and voting that way because if it tabulates then they won’t be able to do that. So let them send it in, and let them go vote. And if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. So that’s the way it is, and that’s what they should do. …

But send in your ballots, send them in strong, whether it’s solicited or unsolicited. The absentees are fine. We have to work to get them. It means something. And you send them in but go to vote and if they haven’t counted it, you can vote. So, that’s the way I view it.

The president tried to clean up the statement in a series of Thursday morning tweets, suggesting that his supporters who vote by mail should also go to the polling place and only vote if election officials report that their mail-in ballots have not been received.

To begin with, it is illegal to attempt to vote twice in an election. This is true under North Carolina and federal law. And it doesn’t matter if one is doing it to “test” the system. In Texas in 2016, as reported by the Washington Post:

Phillip Cook was arrested on Election Day after voting twice. He claimed to be an employee of Trump’s campaign who was testing the security of the electoral system. He wasn’t an employee of the campaign—and the polling location’s security worked perfectly well, it seems.

Trump might have even broken North Carolina law by encouraging the conduct. It is illegal in the state

for any person with intent to commit a fraud to register or vote at more than one precinct or more than one time, or to induce another to do so, in the same primary or election, or to vote illegally at any primary or election.

So are Trump’s comments themselves a criminal inducement to his supporters to illegally vote? Or, in the language of the statute, was Trump by his comments “induc[ing]” with “intent to commit a fraud” a person to vote “more than one time” in “the same …. election”? I think a case could be made that he was. [Continue reading…]