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President Trump on Wednesday escalated his assault against mail voting, falsely claiming that Michigan and Nevada were engaged in voter fraud and had acted illegally, and threatening to withhold federal funds to those states if they proceed in expanding vote-by-mail efforts. The president inaccurately accused Michigan of sending mail ballots to its residents, as his aides later acknowledged, and he offered no basis for his claims of illegal actions by either Michigan or Nevada. The Michigan secretary of state has sent ballot applications — not the ballots themselves — to registered voters, a growing practice among election officials, including in states led by Republicans. (Epstein, Corasaniti and Karni, 5/20)

He also inaccurately said the state was sending out absentee ballots, rather than applications, before later on Wednesday deleting that tweet and correcting the error in another one. “President Donald Trump’s updated statement is also false,’’ said Jake Rollow, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of State. “Absent-voter applications are mailed nearly every election cycle by both major parties and countless advocacy and nonpartisan organizations. Just like them, we have full authority to mail applications to ensure voters know they have the right to vote safely by mail.” (Lucey, 5/20)

The president targeted Michigan with an inaccurate tweet on its voting plans and also went after Nevada in the latest — and the most confused — episode in his campaign against mail-in voting. As states have shifted to remote voting, following health officials recommendations on safety, Trump has denigrated the practice and sought to limit access. He has said repeatedly, without evidence, that mailed ballots allow widespread fraud and has worried publicly that wide availability could lead so many people to vote that Republicans would lose in November. His GOP allies, meanwhile, have fought changes to voting in court and opposed funding to expand mail-in voting in Congress. (Riccardi and Miller, 5/21)

Numerous studies have found little evidence of voter fraud connected to voting by mail. States have broad authority to set their own rules for voting. Many states have pushed to expand vote-by-mail options as a safer alternative in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, sparking a growing partisan fight with Trump and his Republican allies. (Whitesides, 5/20)

Democratic strategists pointed to Trump’s tweets targeting battleground or Democratic-controlled states as evidence that he is trying to gain an edge in states that could decide the outcome in November. They noted that many Republican states are similarly expanding mail balloting, yet Trump has not criticized them. “They’re doing this because they think it gives them some sort of political advantage,” said Guy Cecil, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who leads the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action. “They see what Trump’s poll numbers are, and their philosophy is simple: ‘If we can’t win with the electorate we have, then we try to create an environment that gives us an electorate that we can win with.’ ” (Gardner, Dawsey, Stein and Wagner, 5/20)

In a press briefing at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany repeatedly declined to answer questions about what specifically Trump believed was illegal about Michigan’s efforts. Instead she reiterated Trump‘s unfounded claims, saying he was concerned about “a lot of fraud that is potentially at play when you have mass mail-in voting.“ McEnany wouldn’t say what funding Trump was considering withholding, telling reporters that the tweets were merely “meant to alert Secretary Mnuchin and Mr. Vought, head of OMB, about his concerns with trillions of dollars going to these states” given his concerns about mail-in voting. (Montellaro and Forgey, 5/20)

Elections are run by state and local governments, and it's unclear what legal means Trump would have to withhold funds from the states. Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to allow no-excuse absentee ballots, along with a number of other changes to make access to voting easier. (Neely, 5/20)

A federal appeals court has temporarily halted a lower court judge's ruling that would have allowed all registered voters in Texas afraid of catching the novel coronavirus access to absentee mail-in voting amid the pandemic. The 5th US Circuit of Appeals on Wednesday halted a Tuesday night decision by federal Judge Fred Biery that expanded the "disability" provision in the state's vote-by-mail election code to all registered voters who "lack immunity from Covid-19 and fear infection at polling places." (Mena, 5/20)