This Republican just admitted he stoked fears of voter fraud — but now says they're 'absurd'

Republicans have been stoking fears about "voter fraud" for years now, despite a lack of any evidence that it is a significant problem in the United States. One such Republican is Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, and in a remarkably candid interview with National Public Radio, Adams admitted that the fears of  voter fraud he promoted in the past were misleading.

Adams campaigned on fighting voter fraud and ran on the slogan “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” But when he spoke to NPR, the Republican admitted that GOP hysteria over voter fraud, especially when it comes to voting by mail, is “partly on me because I talked about it in my campaign. But it’s my job now to calm people’s fears.”

President Donald Trump has recently railed against voting by mail, making the baseless claim that it is a recipe for widespread voter fraud — and pro-Trump Republicans have reflexively agreed with him. But Adams told NPR, “People who think that Donald Trump is going to have the election stolen by mail, it’s just absurd.”

It is only recently that Republicans have been expressing such vehement opposition to mail-in ballots. GOP activist Tyler Deaton, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, asserted that his party has a long history of embracing absentee ballots and that if voting by mail gives anyone a “partisan advantage,” it is Republicans — not Democrats.

But Adams told NPR that when he sent out postcards telling Kentucky residents how they could apply for absentee ballots, he had his “head taken off” by other Republicans.

"The biggest challenge I have right now is making the concept of absentee voting less toxic for Republicans,” Adams said to the outlet.