Kellyanne Conway Compares Voting In Person To Standing In Line At Georgetown Cupcake, Which Is Delivery-Only

TOPLINE

White House Advisor Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday echoed President Trump’s denunciations of mail-in voting, arguing that if people can stand in line at Georgetown Cupcakes, they can vote in person.

KEY FACTS

“People are very proud to show up and go to the polls,” Conway said at a press conference, “they wait in line at Georgetown Cupcake for an hour to get a cupcake. So I think they can probably wait in line to do something as constitutionally significant as cast their ballot.”

Undercutting Conway’s point is the fact that Georgetown Cupcake’s DC location is delivery-only, while its Bethesda, MD, New York and Boston locations are all closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Conway’s comments are the latest in a series of arguments made by Trump and officials in his administration against mail-in voting.

Trump blasted Michigan’s secretary of state last week for sending absentee ballot applications to all voters in the state and threatened to withhold relief funding for Michigan, which has been hit hard by both the coronavirus pandemic and recent flooding.

More recently, Trump tweeted that “there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” which was subject to an unprecedented fact-check by twitter.

Key background

States across the country have been shifting towards mail-in elections as the coronavirus has made in-person voting a potentially risky activity. Some states, like California, which had a robust vote-by-mail system before the pandemic, will send mail-in ballots to all voters. Other states with less widespread mail-in voting like Michigan and West Virginia have opted to send absentee ballot applications to all voters instead.

Chief Critic

In addition to believing that mail-in voting is rife with fraud Trump has also expressed a belief that widespread mail-in voting benefits Democrats. However, research has cast doubt on both those assumptions. A New York Times analysis found ample evidence to counter the assertion that mail-in voting is subject to greater fraud than regular in-person voting. Moreover, it found that expanded mail-in voting raises turnout but benefits both parties roughly equally.