Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale acknowledged Friday that he didn’t vote in the 2016 election, citing absentee ballot complications.
“In 2016, I was in New York working to elect Donald Trump and encountered a series of problems receiving my absentee ballot from Texas and missed the deadline,” Parscale said in a statement. “Just further proof that vote-by-mail is not the flawless solution Democrats and the media pretend it is.”
Parscale went on to suggest his difficulties were proof that voting by mail is unreliable and rife with corruption, echoing a common claim by Trump, who has said without evidence that mail-in voting is particularly susceptible to fraud.
CBS News first reported Parscale missing the 2016 vote.
Parscale’s lapse isn’t the first voting faux pas among members of Trump’s inner circle, including the President himself. Trump opted to vote by mail earlier this year — the very option he has been railing against — despite repeatedly passing his polling place. Last year, Trump attempted to register to vote in Florida while claiming that his “legal residence” was in Washington, DC, The Washington Post reported earlier this month.
And Ivanka and Eric Trump were unable to vote in New York’s 2016 primary because they missed the state’s voter registration deadline, Donald Trump said at the time.
Along with his baseless claims about mail-in voting, Trump has frequently claimed rampant voter fraud in the country, even though numerous studies suggest that voter fraud is all but nonexistent in the US and the President’s own voter fraud commission disbanded without finding any evidence to back up his claims.