Donald Trump's campaign manager didn't vote for Donald Trump in 2016
Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's campaign manager, did not vote for President Trump in 2016. In fact, he didn't vote in the general election at all, according to election records obtained by CBS News.
Bexar County, Texas Election Department documents show Parscale, then a San Antonio resident, voted in the 2016 primary but not in the general election. He did cast a ballot in the 2012 and 2018 federal elections. And his 2018 vote was submitted by mail.
"In 2016, I was in New York working to elect Donald Trump and encountered a series of problems receiving my absentee ballot from Texas and missed the deadline," Parscale said in a statement to CBS News. "Just further proof that vote-by-mail is not the flawless solution Democrats and the media pretend it is."
President Trump, who voted by mail in the 2020 Florida primary, has complained the expansion of vote-by-mail is a gateway to fraud as states grapple with holding elections this fall amid the coronavirus pandemic. California's governor signed a bill Friday that mandates sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters.
"There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed," the president tweeted in late May when California's legislature was considering the measure.
Twitter added a fact-check to this tweet, and one other about mail-in voting, saying the posts contained "politically misleading information about voting processes." This was the first time the social media company had added such a label to tweets by the president.
While there have been instances of malfeasance, the rate of voter fraud of any kind remains negligible.
Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Connecticut are now mailing voters absentee ballot applications. New Hampshire and Massachusetts have loosened requirements for absentee voting.
Seventeen states postponed primary elections because of the pandemic.
In an interview with Politico, the president called mail-in voting a threat to his re-election. His campaign, led by Parscale and the RNC, has filed lawsuits to stop the expansion of vote-by-mail.
"There's a vast difference between voting absentee by mail when you can't get to the polls on Election Day versus mailing every registered voter a ballot, even those who didn't request one. The media thinks they're playing 'gotcha' by purposefully ignoring that difference," Parscale said, adding that voter rolls often contain errors.
Parscale submitted his 2018 midterm ballot by mail. Election records show he applied to vote absentee about two weeks before Election Day.
He was hired by Mr. Trump before he announced his candidacy in 2015. He was brought on to build the campaign's website and eventually ascended into candidate Trump's inner circle, working closely with Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner on digital outreach.
He was named campaign manager in early 2018.
