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Trump-appointed judge demands evidence from President Trump for mail-in voter fraud

Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins The First Trade with Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss the role mail-in voting will play in the 2020 election and President Trump's claim that it will lead to fraud.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Rick, look, we're seeing more and more states opt to mail in. Just this morning, New Jersey's governor announced his plans to expand mail-in voting. And might I add, President Trump and the First Lady asking for mail-in votes for Tuesday's primary in Florida. So is Trump flip-flopping here? What is this about?

RICK NEWMAN: He's flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flop, flip-flopping is what he's doing. Yeah, Trump wants it-- he thinks mail-in voting is good for him, but not for anybody else, I think is the way this goes. So what's happening in Pennsylvania is after the primary elections there in June, the Trump campaign sued to stop the use of these drop boxes where people can drop off their ballot instead of going to a polling place, claiming that there was fraud in the election. And what the judge has said just recently here is that, well, if there was fraud, you have to show us the evidence you have of fraud. And the Trump campaign is supposed to provide that by today.

Now most campaign experts and election experts say there's very, very little evidence that this type of voting generates fraud. Of course, President Trump has been claiming this for a long time. He obviously thinks that mail-in voting and being able drop ballots in drop boxes, that this is going to somehow be bad for Republicans and help Democrats win. There's no real evidence for that.

There are a bunch of states that have mail-in voting, including some that are red states, like Utah, for example. Iowa has a lot of mail-in voting, controlled by Republicans. So this fight goes on.

It seems likely that the Trump campaign is not going to be able to present any evidence of fraud. The judge has scheduled a hearing for sometime in September once the evidence comes in or doesn't come in. So by September, we should know where this lawsuit is headed.

BRIAN SOZZI: Rick, cut me some slack for asking this question, but the pressure that President Trump is putting on the Postal Service-- what's the risk that the mail stops?

RICK NEWMAN: It's a great question. There is a lot of fishy stuff happening at the Postal Service. So the new postmaster general Trump appointed is a Trump-- a huge Trump donor. He donated a couple million bucks to the Trump election effort in 2016.

And that's out of the ordinary. Normally you don't have political cronies appointed as postmaster general. Usually it's somebody who's grown up in the Post Office. And what the new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has been doing, he says they need to cut costs, which is true.

But what he's doing so far is he has suspended overtime for postal workers, which means that if you don't finish processing the mail on a given day, instead of working until the job is done and collecting overtime, you just leave it and then deal with it the next day. So that has supposedly led to pile ups inside the Postal Service. And some people are complaining about delays.

And the obvious question-- is this all meant to create some kind of construct for slower delivery of mail-in ballots in the election? So it's getting a lot of scrutiny right now. So no one really knows where this is headed. But I think the postmaster general is going to have to explain what's going on.

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