Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine pointed out the contradiction in telling people to vote during a pandemic.
"It was clear to me, we were asking people, you know, we were messaging, you should vote and we were messaging you should stay home. It finally struck me, that just didn't make any sense, and that's not fair and we're putting people at risk," he told Chris Cuomo.
"You know, the number one Republican in the country says, here's your mistake, is that you forgot that people cheat with mail-in ballots and that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, it happens all the time, he says, and that's why you can't risk it," Cuomo said.
"Mail-in voting is a bad thing, and you allowed it and now you're going to have to pay for that. Why do you disagree?"
"Well, I don't think he was talking about Ohio, but, you know -- "
"No, no, he's never mentioned Ohio specifically, he's been talking about mail-in voting as a concept that you embraced."
DeWine explained Ohio's been doing that for a long time.
"We have a very liberal voting, in the sense that it -- we have voting for four weeks and we do it every election and we have early voting, we let people go in actually to the board of elections and vote, we let them go the Sunday before the election, but for 28 days, they have a right to go in and they also can do absentee ballots. So, we are used to do doing that. I have great confidence in the secretary of state, my lieutenant governor, he's the previous secretary of state and, you know, they know how to run elections and we've had a lot of experience in this, so, we didn't really worry about, you know, any kind of fraud, as far as that was concerned."
This was interesting to me, because a Republican governor is actually contradicting Trump and saying he's seen no evidence of mail-in ballot fraud. (And by that, I assume he means Democratic fraud. Ohio fraud is generally on the Republican end.) DeWine can probably get away with it, though, because Trump needs Ohio to win and it won't help him do that if he attacks the governor.
But it must be killing him.
