TRUMP COMES UP EMPTY WHEN PRESSED FOR EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD IN COURT The Trump campaign’s 524-page response turned up no mail vote fraud
This is it, the emperor has no clothes. I mean this literally. It is what it is. Shocking. But this should be front page news in EVERY US news paper. Here it is. FTR
This should be put in every, and I repeat EVERY newspaper in America. Both of these articles. And it should be known and appreciated that not only is this a scam, but that the Trump legal team completely failed to show ANY mail voting fraud
See this
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TRUMP COMES UP EMPTY WHEN PRESSED FOR EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD IN COURT
The Trump campaign’s 524-page response to a discovery demand turned up precisely zero instances of mail-in voter fraud.
August 20 2020, 1:12 p.m.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S campaign, ordered by a federal court judge in Pennsylvania to back up its claims of fraud in the state’s vote-by-mail system, has documented only a handful of cases of election fraud in recent years — none of which involved mail-in ballots. The revelation, which came in the form of a partially redacted 524-page document produced by the Trump campaign last week, undermines the claim by Trump team operatives that mail-in ballot fraud is a grave risk to Pennsylvania voters.
The campaign is suing Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s county election boards to prevent election administrators from providing secure drop boxes for mail-in ballot returns. These drop boxes allow voters to return their mail-in ballots by hand, without sending them through the postal system and risking delays. The Trump campaign alleges that the practice “provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.”
In a motion last week, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club called on the Trump campaign to provide evidence of the existence of voter fraud, arguing that the campaign’s lawsuit was “replete with salacious allegations and dire warnings” about Pennsylvania’s elections and that they “must either be compelled to provide discovery concerning their fraud-based allegations or be precluded from pursuing these claims going forward.” Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted the motion, ordering the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much.”
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The response provided by the Trump campaign to the opposing counsel, which was shared with The Intercept and Type Investigations, contains a few scant examples of election fraud — but none of the instances in the 524-page discovery document involved mail-in ballots.
“Not only did the campaign fail to provide evidence that voter fraud was a widespread problem in Pennsylvania, they failed to provide any evidence that any misconduct occurred in the primary election or that so-called voter fraud is any sort of regular problem in Pennsylvania,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim director of Common Cause PA, one of the parties in the lawsuit. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
The non-redacted portion of the Trump campaign’s response consists in large part of news reports and copies of the campaign’s open records requests to counties. It contains no new evidence of fraud beyond what local news outlets have previously reported. The examples of fraud that it does provide include the case of four poll workers who admitted to harassment and intimidation of voters at one polling place during a special election in 2017. It also includes an election judge who altered vote totals in his polling place between 2014 and 2016 at the behest of a political consultant. And while the amended complaint brought by the campaign cites a few incidents of mail-in fraud, none were mentioned in the discovery document.
“Not only did the campaign fail to provide evidence that voter fraud was a widespread problem in Pennsylvania, they failed to provide any evidence that any misconduct occurred in the primary election.”
This is far from the first time that Republicans have failed to substantiate their frequent claims that voter fraud is a persistent problem in American elections. In 2018, one of U.S.’s most prominent crusaders against voter fraud, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was asked by a district court to produce evidence that noncitizens were voting in his home state of Kansas. Kobach brought forth witnesses, but their testimony fell apart on cross examination. Judge Julie Robinson wrote in her opinion that “evidence that the voter rolls include ineligible citizens is weak. At most, 39 [non]citizens have found their way onto the Kansas voter rolls in the last 19 years.” The rare known cases of voter fraud were not the tip of the iceberg, she concluded, “there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
After taking office, Trump established a controversial presidential commission to study voter fraud. The commission met only twice before disbanding without producing evidence of widespread voter fraud in U.S. elections.
With state Democrats simultaneously suing to affirm the legality of Pennsylvania’s drop boxes, Boockvar has asked the state Supreme Court to settle the relevant questions of election law before the federal trial is completed. Mail-in ballots will start going out to voters in mid-September.
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Why this is so important. See this
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-chaotic-design-of-trumps-mail-in-voting-rants
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The Chaotic Design of Trump’s Mail-In-Voting Rants
By Sue Halpern
July 31, 2020
Voting by post requires a functioning delivery service and sufficient funding for states—two things that the President is determined to sabotage.Photograph by Mike Blake / Reuters
On Thursday, when Donald Trump casually suggested on Twitter that the November election be delayed because “Universal Mail-In Voting” would make it “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” he was either setting the stage to contest the outcome or to explain away his impending defeat, or both. As the President should know by now, in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic is dangerous, especially for older Americans and those with underlying health conditions. Yet he and his chorus of enablers have made a habit of trash-talking voting by mail, claiming, erroneously, that it promotes fraud. It’s no accident that Trump’s tweet specifically assailed “Universal Mail-In Voting,” since the word “universal” is triggering for anyone who is afraid of the will of the people.
So far, only five states have nearly universal mail-in balloting. For most of them, it took years of legislative wrangling before it was adopted, and years of preparation before it was deployed. Additionally, thirty-four states and the District of Columbia have no-excuse absentee balloting (meaning that anyone can request an absentee ballot for any reason). And every state has the infrastructure to enable military and overseas voters to cast ballots from afar. (Inexplicably, according to Thursday’s tweet, Trump believes that absentee ballots are good and mail-in ballots are bad, even though they are the same thing.) All told, nearly eighty per cent of the electorate would be able to vote by mail in November.
Past primaries have offered a preview of the problems that can arise when significant numbers of voters choose this option. (Hint: the issue isn’t voter fraud.) Take California, a blue state, where more than four million people voted by mail in February of 2008. The deluge was so great that election officials were still counting ballots weeks after the election. (One unexpected wrinkle: they had to iron thousands of ballots that had got crumpled in the mail before they could feed them into the tabulator.) In New Jersey, another blue state, some voters found their ballots returned to them (and thus not counted) because the Postal Service scanned the wrong addresses; other citizens received hastily assembled ballots with the wrong slate of candidates. In New York City, where more than four hundred thousand ballots were cast by mail in the June primary, election officials do not expect to have a final vote tally for some jurisdictions until August. A hundred thousand have already been invalidated, some because they arrived too late, others because they weren’t signed or had a signature that didn’t match the signature on file.
These are some of the typical, non-malicious ways that voters may find themselves disenfranchised. When there is an exponential increase in the number of absentee ballots, many of which will be cast by people likely to make mistakes because they’re unfamiliar with the process, the number of rejections will rise, too. So will the number of lawsuits challenging the results.
But voting by mail can also be used as a tool for voter suppression. In 2016, for example, mailed ballots cast by Blacks and Latinos in Florida were rejected more than two and half times as often as those cast by white voters. In states with intentionally restrictive “exact match” voter-registration requirements, signature rejections are an easy way to cull legitimate voters.
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A deluge of absentee-ballot requests may, paradoxically, put pressure on traditional polling places. In Georgia—not yet a blue state—officials were unable to process the backlog of absentee-ballot requests in time for the primary in June. As a consequence, many voters ended up voting in person, but the number of available sites was diminished, due to both the virus and state-sanctioned voter suppression. (Sixteen thousand voters were assigned to a single polling location in Atlanta.)
Even in the best of circumstances, voting by mail requires a functional postal service. Trump’s effort to defund and decimate the U.S. Postal Service is a blunt instrument of disenfranchisement. Can it simply be a coincidence that the President replaced a Postmaster General committed to facilitating voting by mail with a crony named Louis DeJoy who, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, has instructed postal carriers to slow down deliveries? As my colleague Steve Coll wrote this week, in states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, where ballots that are not received by Election Day are automatically tossed out, the directive could be especially crushing.
The quick pivot to voting by mail will be expensive, and it’s not clear where that money will come from. One estimate by the Brennan Center for Justice puts the price tag at upward of a billion dollars for postage, printing, drop boxes, processing, ballot tracking, and other security measures. The most recent coronavirus stimulus package proposed by Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans allocates zero dollars to shoring up the November election. In contrast, a House bill would send nearly four billion dollars to the states, not only to assist with absentee balloting but to insure the safety of polling places, poll workers, and voters. Unfortunately, it is aspirational.
A number of nonprofits are attempting to step into the breach. An alliance of youth-empowerment organizations, election-protection groups, and corporations have come together to create Power the Polls, in order to train and dispatch a new generation of poll workers. Other groups have been mounting campaigns to help people negotiate the sometimes complicated process of getting an absentee ballot, a procedure that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has seen many county clerks’ offices closed. One organization has been perfecting a way to insure that ballot signatures and voter-registration signatures match. Still, without a significant infusion of money, most jurisdictions will be left to shoulder the burdens of running elections on their own during the pandemic.
This is by design. Even before Thursday’s tweet, Trump was threatening to cut off funding for states that expanded absentee voting. Yet even the Republican leadership, which has spent the past three and a half years making sure that the states will not have sufficient funds to secure our elections, found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to face Trump’s suggestion to delay the election. Their responses, though, could not be matched by this simple rebuke levelled by the seventeen-term Democratic congressman John Lewis, who died on July 17th. “Voting and participating in the democratic process are key,” he wrote in a valedictory essay, which was published on Thursday and timed to coincide with his funeral. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”
Sue Halpern is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of, most recently, the novel “Summer Hours at the Robbers Library.”
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This should be put in every, and I repeat EVERY newspaper in America. Both of these articles. And it should be known and appreciated that not only is this a scam, but that the Trump legal team completely failed to show ANY mail voting fraud
Defend America. Fight back
Andrew Beckwith, PhD
Nonprofit Research Policy Analyst | Specializing in Democracy, Voter-Fraud Disinformation, & Voter Suppression
4 年Andrew Beckwith, thank you for sharing Richard Salame's and Sue Halpern's articles. They are very timely!
President at TAYPE International Business Services Inc.
4 年Because: of course. Another Trumpian wild goose chase.