President Donald Trump has revived one of the weird false claims from his first presidency and his 2024 marketing campaign: an assertion that Americans are required to show identification to buy groceries.
Trump was mocked when he made variations of this claim in 2018 and 2019 whereas pushing for stricter voter identification legal guidelines. But he stated it once more in 2023 as he ran for president, then stated it as soon as extra on Wednesday morning whereas baselessly questioning the legitimacy of US elections within the wake of Republican defeats in various state and local elections the day prior.
“All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID,” Trump said Wednesday at a breakfast with Republican senators.
Americans clearly don’t want to present identification to buy groceries or fuel.
Grocery shops usually require identification for purchases of alcohol or tobacco, purchases of certain medications and for the small proportion of purchases made by private test. Stores could often ask for ID beneath different circumstances.
But these are exceptions somewhat than the rule. Contrary to Trump’s claims, Americans usually buy groceries with out ever having to inform anybody who they’re. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of Americans every single day buy fuel with out ever displaying identification; a lot of them don’t even work together with an individual whereas paying on the pump.
In 2018, when Trump’s then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was requested about Trump’s preliminary false claim that picture identification was wanted to buy groceries, she suggested he was referring particularly to purchases of beer or wine.
But he quickly made clear he was really speaking about meals, particularly mentioning “a box of cereal” in an interview three months later. In 2023, he falsely claimed identification was wanted “if you buy a loaf of bread.”
On Wednesday, Trump repeated his false claim that “if you have mail-in ballots,” an election is “automatically corrupt.”
It merely isn’t. Mail-in voting is a professional methodology utilized by professional voters to solid professional ballots. Elections consultants say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally increased with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots – but additionally that fraud charges in main US elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots. There isn’t any proof that the elections held Tuesday have been something aside from free and honest.
Trump additionally repeated his false claim that a fee led by former President Jimmy Carter “said about mail-in ballots: ‘If there is mail-in ballots, there will definitely be corruption.’”
That’s not what Carter or the fee stated. Trump has repeatedly misstated the fee’s conclusions.
It’s true that the fee Carter co-chaired twenty years in the past was usually skeptical of voting by mail. Its 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”
But the report didn’t say that “there will definitely be corruption” in elections the place mail-in ballots are used. In reality, the report highlighted an instance of profitable mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections solely by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.”
The report additionally provided some suggestions for making using mail-in ballots safer and referred to as for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail.
Carter, who died in 2024, said in a 2020 assertion: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”