Donald Trump’s ally Jeff Van Drew is talking to the dead these days, and we aren’t joking! The 72-year-old Republican is so obsessed with the alleged vote fraud during the 2020 elections that he sees ghosts nowadays.
Van Drew has claimed in a recent interview that he “spoke with” a large number of “people who passed away” who had received the voter ballots. During his appearance on Fox News Business, he referred to the 2020 elections as a “debacle” due to the expansion of mail-in voting. He said, “Sometimes people would have multiple ballots sent to different addresses.”
“Other times, people who are passed away—these are real people I spoke to, large numbers of them, and it’s indicative of what happened around the country,” the MAGA Rep added.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew claims he’s spoken to “large numbers” of dead people who had mail ballots sent to them pic.twitter.com/NWl5deC0QF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2025
The Republican is now getting mocked for his statement. An X user wrote, “To be fair, he seems to know his audience well.”
To be fair he seems to know his audience well
— coinmon (@therealCoinmon) August 19, 2025
“Where? How? At a seance?” another asked. Someone wrote, “I didn’t know residents of cemeteries get mail.”
Donald Trump and his allies can’t let go of the alleged vote fraud controversy, as the current president still finds it hard to digest that he lost to Joe Biden. Trump had earlier claimed that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia in 2020. But his claims turned out to be false. December 2021 report by Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the election investigators “found just four absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election from voters who had died, all of them returned by relatives.”
Trump was off by 4,996, and eventually made a mockery out of himself.
Stanford University published a study in 2020 evaluating elections in Washington, which has universal mail-in voting. The topic of the study was “Are Dead People Voting by Mail?”
The findings mentioned that among 4.5 million voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, “there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters.”
The report further explained that this could be because of two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, and ruled out the possibility of fraud.
Van Drew was a Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district in the 2018 election. However, in 2020, he joined the Republican Party. He religiously supported the unsuccessful attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, where Joe Biden beat Trump.
“In general, it is ripe for abuse,” he said of mail-in voting. Interestingly, his home state of New Jersey allows any person to cast their vote via mail-in ballot without giving any reason. During the 2024 general elections, out of 4.3 million ballots cast, nearly 760,000 were via mail-in ballots – and Van Drew, who is strongly objecting to mail-in ballots, marked his reelection victory with 58.1% of the vote.
Meanwhile, during his midnight rant, Trump demanded the end of mail-in voting. He took to his Truth Social and wrote in his signature all-caps style, “END MAIL-IN VOTING, AND GO TO PAPER BALLOTS. 100 additional seats will go to Republicans!!!”
Trump also said in another social media post, “An executive order is being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt.”
Elections experts have, however, expressed that Trump’s plan to end mail-in voting in federal elections is ‘unconstitutional’.
As per the BBC, UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen called Trump’s statement ‘wrong’ and ‘dangerous.’
“The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” he wrote in his blog.
