Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Who Backed President’s Vote-By-Mail Attack, Has Voted By Mail For 10 Years

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has been defending President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting by mail and conspiracy theories about massive fraud that comes with it, pushing back against critics who point out that Trump has not offered any evidence to back up the claims.

But a new report has revealed that McEnany herself has used mail-in voting for the last decade at her home in Florida.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that the Tampa native has voted by mail in every Florida election that she has participated in since 2010. That included a mail-in ballot for the March 2020 presidential primary — for which Trump, who switched his residency from New York to Florida in 2019, also used a mail-in ballot.

The newspaper pulled local voting records to find that McEnany has voted by mail 11 times over the last 10 years. The White House press secretary emailed a statement to the newspaper saying that her use of mail-in voting was proper and backing Trump’s unfounded theory that Democrats are planning massive fraud by the use of mail-in ballots.

“Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason,” she said.

“It means you’re absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person. President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp.”

Trump has frequently attacked the idea of mail-in voting as states have considered expanding it in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. Trump has repeatedly claimed that there are thousands of instances of fraud and coercion for those using mail-in ballots, though not offered any evidence to back the claim. In a recent tweet, the claimed that mailboxes would be robbed and that ballots would be forged, adding that the governor of California is sending ballots to millions of people in the state.

The tweet earned the first-ever fact check from Twitter, which took people to a link with facts about mail-in voting that contradicted many of Trump’s claims.

Many voting experts have noted that there has been no widespread fraud in the states that employ mail-in voting on a large scale. The Tampa Bay Times reported that a months-long investigation of potential voter fraud in Florida ended with no prosecutions. The report noted that mail-in voting is popular in Florida with both Democrats and Republicans.