Republicans set stage for PA vote counting shenanigans
If you can't beat 'em, destroy the system.
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There’s no question that for the 2024 election, Pennsylvania is currently ground zero, so it’s unsurprising that both campaigns are campaigning hard in the state. Only one side, though, has made attacks on the integrity of elections — in Pennsylvania and beyond — a core part of its strategy.
Given the shambolic and unpredictable nature of their candidate, whose visit to Pennsylvania over the weekend involved unhinged musings on the size of a famous deceased golfer’s junk, Republicans can’t rely on Donald Trump carrying the state based on policy or personality. (Watch the video below to see what we mean about Trump’s beyond bizarre riff over the weekend in Latrobe on Arnold Palmer and his man parts.)
So MAGAs are laying the groundwork for Trump’s steal attempt 2.0.
The GOP is still furious that President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020. Combined with their commitment to the Big Lie, it’s inevitable that Republicans approached the commonwealth not as a state where they need to win the most votes but instead as one where they need to destroy confidence in the process of voting, with designs on stealing the result if Trump again comes up short.
Distrust by design
Republicans have, of course, been pushing unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations for years, but the specific fixation on how Pennsylvania processes votes — particularly mail-in ballots — has its genesis in election night 2020.
Trump led by roughly 700,000 votes by day’s end, but mail ballots, which overwhelmingly favored Biden, cut into that lead over the next several days. Four days later, just as Rudy Guiliani was holding the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference in Philadelphia, CNN called Pennsylvania and the 2020 election for Biden. Biden ultimately won the state by 81,000 votes.
In a normal political climate, the fact that Democrats cast far more mail ballots than their Republican counterparts would have led to the GOP pursuing an aggressive strategy to be sure their own voters took advantage of the mail voting option. But because Trump made attacks on mail ballots central to his 2020 campaign and continued to do so in 2024, Republicans came up with another approach: making the counting of ballots in the state a chaotic mess that will undermine trust in the results.
Pennsylvania voters who vote by mail must return their ballot in two envelopes. The inner envelope is for the secrecy of the ballot. The outer return envelope must be signed and dated with the current date. Thousands of people get this requirement wrong, either failing to provide a date or giving the wrong one. Although that date has nothing to do with how Pennsylvania election officials determine whether the mail-in ballot was cast and received timely, last month the state’s highest court ruled that ballots with misdated or undated envelopes will not be counted. This could result in over 10,000 ballots being thrown out.
Sometimes, voters forget the inner secrecy envelope instead. This requires that their mail-in vote be rejected, but state law allows them to cast a provisional ballot on election day. County boards of election then review whether that voter was eligible to vote when they cast the provisional ballot, and if they are, their vote gets counted. Republicans don’t like that either, so they’re still fighting in court to have those provisional ballots thrown out in Butler County.
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Voters only know if their mail ballot was rejected if the county tells them. So, Republicans are also trying to stop county election officials from notifying voters that their ballot was defective. That lawsuit is still pending before the state supreme court. But this case highlights how much Republicans want to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters, with the GOP pouring time and money into an argument that the best election procedure is one where voters never get a chance to fix a ballot mistake because they never learn they made a mistake.
Meanwhile, several of the state’s GOP members of congress just filed a suit attacking how the state processes ballots for overseas voters, including for members of the military. Alleging that the methods for verification of the voter’s identity are inadequate, the suit demands none of those votes be counted until the state verifies eligibility.
Pennsylvania’s rules for counting overseas ballots have been the same for years, but Republicans didn’t bother to file their lawsuit until less than a month before the election after some 25,000 ballots had already been sent to overseas voters. (Watch Pennsylvania GOP congressman Dan Meuser crash and burn last Friday on CNN while trying to defend his disenfranchisement effort.)
Republicans aren’t just pursuing these actions to get more ballots thrown out, though that is certainly a plus as far as they’re concerned. The larger goal here is to sew distrust in the election, likely setting up a challenge for Trump to contest the results if Pennsylvania doesn’t go his way.
Right now, all of these lawsuits send the implicit message that voting in Pennsylvania is ripe with opportunities for fraud and that anything save for in-person voting on election day is suspect. So if Pennsylvania sees a repeat of 2020, where Trump leads on election day but that lead is overcome by later-counted mail, overseas, and provisional ballots, people are already primed to see the results as suspicious.
That’s why, despite their insistence that prompt election results are critical, Republicans have also blocked efforts to allow the state to start processing mail ballots before election day. Most states allow election workers to take some steps toward counting mail ballots earlier because processing those ballots takes much longer. Election workers have to remove ballots from their envelopes and flatten them before they can be run through the voting machine, which results in each ballot taking several minutes to be counted.
About 2.7 million people voted by mail in Pennsylvania in 2020, and 1.7 million have already requested mail-in ballots for 2024. With those numbers, it is inevitable that the count will stretch past election night. It’s also nearly inevitable that the later count will break Democratic, as more than one million of those 1.7 million ballots were sent to registered Democrats, versus just under 500,000 for Republicans.
Unless Democrats have a much stronger election day showing in the state than in 2020, conditions are ripe for a repeat scenario where a Trump lead is whittled away over several days of counting. That delay means Republicans are primed to cry foul and try to block the count. It also gives the GOP time to whip their supporters into a frenzy.
The war on free and fair counting
Though everything may come down to Pennsylvania, Republicans are hedging their bets with similar attacks on mail ballot counting in other swing states.
Besides Pennsylvania, Republicans have also filed lawsuits about overseas ballots in North Carolina and Michigan. In Nevada, the GOP is suing to invalidate a state law that allows mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by election day but not received until up to four business days later.
Current GOP attacks on ballot counting in Wisconsin, another swing state that had delayed results in 2020 because of the counting of absentee ballots, have been confined to trying to invalidate over 100,000 voter registrations. However, Wisconsin has a law similar to that of Pennsylvania, which does not allow them to begin processing absentee ballots until the polls open on election day.
Absent a decisive election day victory by Harris, it’s likely the results of the election won’t be known for several days. That’s not nefarious and it’s not fraud. It’s a perfectly normal outcome when the processing of mail ballots takes longer, and it’s an inevitable outcome when efforts to speed it up have been blocked by the very party complaining about the delays. But with Trump as a candidate, Republicans have uncertain odds at best of winning on the merits, so this soup of litigation, conspiracy, and distrust is their fall back option.
That’s it for today
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Ask any woman who heard Trump roar "I love women" at that rally what their reaction was and I'll bet it was that when they hear someone speak like that they look for the exits and make sure they are never alone with that person. The men behind him laughed in that bar room kind of 'gotcha bro' way.
The sad part of this situation are all the spineless enablers in Congress that know he’s full of shit; they know there is absolutely zero election fraud, except for the fraud they themselves, are perpetrating, yet, they continue this ruse because there’s no way out for the party. They’ve sold their souls, jumped into the abyss, and now they’re stuck perpetuating this BIG LIE!
And apparently, they don’t care that they are destroying all of our election norms in the process; making our vulnerable republic into a sitting duck for continued exploitation by cheap snake oil salemen, whose only panacea for our ills, is to destroy our country from within.
Good Times!…:)