Military families angry after Trump campaign appears to accuse them of ‘criminal voter fraud’

‘We take our duties as citizens very seriously’

A military wife who said President Donald Trump’s campaign falsely accused her family of “criminal voter fraud” has spoken out, recalling in a new interview the “shock” she felt seeing the accusation, which she said “had been made without any basis in fact”.

“My husband and I have both been accused of fraud,” Amy Rose, a former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union whose husband serves as a major in the US Air Force. “We take our duties as citizens very seriously.”

Speaking to Military.com, the Air Force spouse described how she came to learn her family was included in a list of more than 3,000 voters in Nevada, all of whom the Trump campaign claimed “improperly cast” absentee ballots despite not living in the state.

Ms Rose told the news outlet her husband has been earning his PhD in California in an aerospace engineering program paid for by the military, and since he was on military orders, he was not required to change his residence. She said she and her husband were “involved in the community” in Nevada: “Where the military vote, it’s considered their home because as military families we are not really able to set down roots in one place that often.”

According to Military.com, the Trump campaign list included over 1,000 locations where military personnel were based in key electoral states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, where Ms Rose and her husband voted in 2020.

Ms Rose, whose comments were published on Veterans Day, shared how it felt to have her “integrity challenged” by the president’s re-election campaign, amid Mr Trump’s all-out assault on the Democratic electoral process.

“To see my integrity challenged, along with other members of the military to be challenged in this way, it is a shock,” she said. “And to be potentially disenfranchised because of these actions, that's not OK.”

While the list did not specifically identify Ms Rose and her husband, she said she made the connection by matching the specific zip codes associated with each supposedly “fraudulent” ballot with the areas her and her husband live in both Nevada and California. In some cases, Ms Rose said the list specifically identified addresses on Air Force bases. 

Some reports have since indicated the campaign may send a corrected list to local officials. But for voters like Ms Rose, the damage had already been done.

The apparently false claims of voter fraud are yet another example of the frivolousness behind some of the recent GOP-led attacks on the electoral process, as Mr Trump continued promoting false claims of systematic and nationwide voter fraud. The president lied long before Election Day when he said he could not lose the election unless there was systematic rigging.

Several of the president’s lawsuits have already been thrown out and deemed arbitrary, with federal judges finding the claims to have no basis in fact or reality. And yet the Trump campaign has continued vowing a wave of legal battles in crucial battleground states where Mr Biden managed to surmount a victory and secure more than 270 votes in the Electoral College, making him the projected victor of the 2020 elections.