President Donald Trump is pushing for law enforcement at polling places for safety reasons, not voter suppression, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday.
There won't be "thousands of sheriffs" at the polls on Nov. 3, Meadows said on "Fox News Sunday," but "if the judges at those polling places need any kind of security, we're going to make sure we have the resources to do that."
Fox News' Sean Hannity last week asked Trump in an interview if there would be "poll watchers" to make sure all voters were registered.
"We're going to have everything," Trump replied. "We're going to have sheriffs, and we're going to have law enforcement, and we're going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we're going to have everybody and attorneys general. But it's very hard."
Law enforcement at polling places "is an old tactic that has been used, especially in the South, as a form of voter suppression, especially against minorities," Fox News host Chris Wallace pointed out to Meadows.
"I think what the president was really addressing was to make sure that if you want to show up and vote in person, we're going to make sure that that is safe," Meadows said. "Whether you're voting for him, or you're voting for Joe Biden, or you're voting for some other candidate."
The chief of staff also suggested, without citing specific evidence, that social distancing procedures had increased unsafe behavior in public.
"Sometimes in this new Covid response what we're finding is that because of social distancing we see a lot more aggressive behavior than I've ever seen in a grocery store," Meadows said.
The president has not brought up deploying any of the Department of Homeland Security's armed agents to polling sites, acting Secretary Chad Wolf said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union. "This is not a mission for the Department of the Homeland Security ... we don't have any authority to do that at the department," he said.
Civil rights experts have said having law enforcement at polling places is "unlawful" given the potential for voter intimidation. Trump has frequently asserted that voter fraud, especially with mail-in voting, is widespread — though election security experts say cases of electoral fraud are extremely rare in the U.S.
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