Ivanka and Eric Trump say they simply didn’t realize how the system worked, causing them to miss the deadline to register for the 2016 Republican presidential primary in New York.
“I was an independent,” Ivanka Trump told Anderson Cooper during a CNN town hall Tuesday that included the Trump family. “We’re not a family of politicians, we haven’t been in politics very long. New York has one of the most onerous rules in terms of registration and it required us to register a long time ago, almost … close to a year ago and we didn’t do that. We found out about it sort of after the fact,” she explained.
Ivanka then told Cooper that was the reason she started making a series of videos “to educate people in each of the individual states because every state is different.”
Asked when she found out she wasn’t going to be able to vote, she said, “around a week later.”
Eric said he too didn’t realize how the system worked, telling Cooper “it was our first kind of foray in politics,” adding it was “an educational process.”
Trump said he was “fine with it,” adding, “I have a feeling she’ll be voting in November for me.”
In order to vote in the state’s primary, Eric and Ivanka needed to have changed their registration to Republican by Oct. 9, 2015.