Washington: Republican presidential candidate and former president Donald Trump on Sunday expressed frustration over the current voting pattern as he urged his fellow countrymen to vote for him in this final battle and called for a mandatory voter ID. The Democrats are opposing voter ID so that they can cheat, he alleged.
"I don't know why the hell we can't have a voter ID. The real Democrats want to have things like voter ID. They know it's crooked. There's only one reason you don't want a voter ID. There's only one reason, and that's to cheat. There is no other reason. There's no other reason. And they do cheat," Trump told his supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania, a battle ground state.
He said it's "damn shame" that nobody seems to talk about it. "I'm the only one that talks about it because everyone's afraid to damn talk about it. Then they accuse you of being a conspiracy-theorist... and they want to lock you up".
"They want to put you in jail. The ones that should be locked up are the ones that cheat on these horrible elections that we go through in our country," Trump said.
He also called for returning to the ballot paper system. "You ought to damn well go to paper ballots. You ought to go to voter ID. You ought to have the election over by 9 o'clock. I'm hearing now they're going to take weeks. Can you imagine? They spend all this money, all this money on machines, and they're going to say, we may take an extra 12 days to determine. What do you think happens during that 12 days? What do you think happens? These elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock on Tuesday night. Bunch of crooked people. These are crooked people," he said.
"In California, they just signed a bill that if you're an official or anybody, you're not even allowed to ask anybody for their voter ID. If you do, you've created a criminal act or something. I mean, they only do that because they want to cheat. What the hell are they doing? The whole world is laughing at us," Trump said.
"They're laughing at us. If nothing comes out of this whole thing, it's going to teach you damn well better get a different system. These bloodsuckers up there, they do nothing about it. What a shame. That's why the world laughs at us," he said.
"At 9 o'clock in the evening, they called the winner. They called the loser. Everyone home. Everybody was fine. They had voter ID. They had paper ballots. They had one-day election. At 9 o'clock, it was over. They called the winner. They called the loser... they say, we'll wait till the next time. We got to get smart as a country. This is just one thing. It's all corrupt," Trump said.
He also took on his Democratic rival Kamala Harris. "She is corrupt. She's a corrupt person. I'm running against a totally corrupt person. I'm really not running against her. I'm running against a corrupt machine called the Democratic Party. It's totally a corrupt party," he said.
