Trump told Fox News: “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement.”
The speaker of the Democrat-led House of Representatives urged voters to “ignore” comments Trump made to Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity.
“Don’t pay any attention to what the president is saying, because it is all designed to suppress the vote,” she told reporters. “He’s going to have law enforcement — that’s in their playbook.”
“It’s in their playbook that they’ll have people intimidated to vote by having ICE agents, or other law enforcement there to instil fear in people as they show up… I know it’s scary, but ignore that,” she said.
Trump told Hannity he was thinking of using police and federal prosecutors to monitor ballot fraud during the election, which he has already claimed is under threat from mass mail-in voting.
“We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement,” he said. “And we’re going to have hopefully US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals.”
Trump repeated his attacks on Democrats’ demand for universal postal voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic, claiming that in the State of Nevada mail-in ballots can be accepted without the voter’s signature.
Pelosi retorted that Trump was withholding funding from the US Mail in a bid to restrict postal voting.
And she echoed 19th-century New York attorney-general John Van Buren’s famous maxim “vote early, vote often.”
“Make a plan to vote. Do so,” she said. “Vote early, so that we will have an outcome that is clear.”
