Donald Trump calls for postponement of 2020 US presidential election

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the White House; AP Photo/Evan Vucci - Credit: AP

Donald Trump has called on the 2020 US presidential elections to be postponed.

In a string of posts on his Twitter account, Trump said he wanted to postpone elections because of potential ‘mail-in voting fraud’ but failed to back his claim up with evidence.

‘With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,’ he wrote.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1288818160389558273

‘It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???’

In an earlier message, he accused his rivals the Democrat Party of colluding with foreign powers to interfere in the postal vote.

‘The Dems talk of foreign influence in voting, but they know that Mail-In Voting is an easy way for foreign countries to enter the race,’ he said.

This is not the first time the president has expressed disapproval for this year’s November election.

Earlier this year, he made suggestions of ‘ignoring’ the poll if there was no clear winner. He has even gone so far as to share Instagram and Twitter posts suggesting big business – in particular, the pharmaceutical industry – were deliberately trying to oust him from office and posts content by far-right conspiracy theory group QAnon.

Last month, Trump told supporters in Arizona that ‘this will be, in my opinion, the most corrupt election in the history of our country’.

Trump currently lags eight percentage points behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the Real Clear Politics average polls.

The president has previously claimed that postal voting was ‘already proving to be a catastrophic disaster’ in areas where it was being tried out.

California, Utah, Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon and Washington have all elected for an all-mail ballot this year.

For this to occur, these states will send ballots to registered voters to fill out and return.

Critics of postal voting argue that people could vote more than once via absentee ballots and in person.

Trump has in the past said there was a risk of ‘thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place’. However, he never provided evidence to back up his claims.