Trump's account on Twitter
Photo: Jaap Arriens / ZUMA Press / imago imagesTwitter has issued a warning on a message from US President Donald Trump about allegedly planned election fraud. The Republican's tweet violated the rules to maintain the "integrity of the elections," the company said on Sunday. Trump made a misleading health claim in his tweet that could potentially deter people from voting, it said.
The tweet could therefore only be distributed to a limited extent, among other things. However, a click on the warning led to Trump's original tweet. It is in the public interest that the message is still accessible, it said.
In the tweet, Trump again claimed, without giving any valid reasons, that the Democrats wanted to use the increase in postal votes expected due to the corona pandemic for election fraud. Specifically, he called special mailboxes into which election papers can be thrown as a "disaster" with regard to security.
With a view to the coronavirus, which can trigger the disease Covid-19, Trump also wrote that the mailboxes were "not Covid-disinfected". He also suggested that they were controlled by parties. "A big scam!" he wrote.
In the United States, a good 33 million Americans voted by postal vote in 2016. In the November election, there are likely to be significantly more due to the pandemic. Trump has therefore recently repeatedly warned against election fraud. Experts and also many Republicans reject Trump's warnings. Election fraud is very rare in the United States.
A study by the Brennan Center think tank, for example, concluded that the likelihood of an American manipulating the postal vote is less than the likelihood of being struck by lightning. However, many Democrats fear that Trump's campaign against postal voting is aimed at calling into question the legality of the vote in the event he is defeated
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