CNN’s in-house MAGA advocate Scott Jennings is being rebuked by his colleagues for spreading falsehoods about election security.
Speaking on CNN’s The Arena, hosted by Kasie Hunt, Jennings went head-to-head with CNN’s liberal pundit David Axelrod about mail-in voting. President Donald Trump, a frequent user of mail-in voting, has long targeted the practice, claiming without evidence that it is all fraudulent.
Jennings, echoing talking points from the president, said he was citing an article about apparent mail-in voting issues in Arizona, a state that has offered vote-by-mail options since 1991—long before Trump began proclaiming elections were being tainted by fraud due to mail-in ballots.
“President Trump is speaking to an issue that bothers people today. Can you trust the mail-in ballot system?” Jennings began.
“I was reading a story from a non-partisan… Journalism outfit in Arizona today. Did you know in the primary this summer, something like 50,000 mail ballots never reached their intended recipient? In ‘24, it was 71,000 ballots,” Jennings proclaimed.
He appeared to be citing a story from the Arizona Mirror titled “Over 50,000 ballots never made it to voters in Arizona’s primary election. That isn’t unusual.”
He asserted that “mail-in ballots are inherently less safe, less secure, and less reliable than voting in person. He’s always believed that.”
To that, Axelrod offered a rebuttal, saying that Trump “keeps raising it as an issue, even though every time people look at this issue, it is a, it’s a false issue. There is no evidence that there is this kind of massive fraud and mail-in voting.”
After the segment, Axelrod tried to further set the record straight on social media, explaining why Jennings’ point was false.
“Yesterday my @CNN colleague @ScottJenningsKY offered as justification for the @POTUS’s bid to seize control of mail-in voting a story that 50,000 ballots had been sent out but never delivered during the June primary election in AZ. So I looked it up and you can, too,” he posted, attaching the story on the topic.
“These cases reflected people who had moved or died since the last election and could not be found at that address. It doesn’t reflect completed ballots that voters mailed back. And, as the story points out, it is a fairly typical number. In fact, these ballots aren’t forwarded to new mailing addresses. That’s an election security measure--a feature not a bug--to ensure that people don’t vote twice,” the post continued.
Axelrod noted that Arizona’s “election system has been well-scrutinized and found to be remarkably fair, honest and accurate.”
And in a further dig at his CNN colleague, he wrote: “These specious arguments are offered to justify Trump’s unjustifiable claims, and are meant to sow confusion and doubt about an election system whose probity has been the envy of the world.”
His post was reposted by Hunt, the anchor of the show on which Jennings’ election assertions were aired.
Trump has been trying to get the USPS to regulate and approve the design of states’ ballot envelopes and regulate a federal database of absentee voters.
But the Supreme Court denied the Trump administration’s request to implement parts of his orders on mail-in voting.
