Carter affirms safety of mail-in voting after Barr and White House cite him to diminish it

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/04/politics/carter-vote-by-mail-safety-barr-white-house/index.html 

Jimmy Carter is pushing back on efforts by Attorney General William Barr and the White House to use the former Democratic president's work studying voting by mail to discredit the practice.

"I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years," Carter said in a statement Thursday.

He also contextualized his findings from a mail-voting commission in 2005 that Barr and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany have employed to disparage voting by mail.

 Speaking to CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, Barr had referenced the "fundamental problem" that "the bipartisan commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker said ... that mail-in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion."

McEnany had asserted earlier Thursday that Carter "said in 2005, as part of a bipartisan commission, absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud."

But Carter on Thursday pointed to a statement last May from the Carter Center endorsing the use of mail-in ballots. Using the findings from the 2005 commission report, that statement argued "that where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place ... there was little evidence of voter fraud."