Mail-In Ballot Gaslighting

News item:

Luzerne County, Pa., is Trump country. The president won the county by nearly 20 points four years ago and has returned multiple times since, holding rallies in the county seat of Wilkes-Barre in 2018 and at a manufacturing facility in the county in the past month.

It is not, in other words, the sort of place where you’d assume that Democratic operatives would launch an effort to subvert the 2020 election. Yet over the past 24 hours, that’s been the subtext to assertions made by the president, the White House and the Justice Department — a subtext which by now seems almost entirely false. [snip]

What we have learned, in fact, isn’t that Democrats are trying to rig the election. It’s that the Trump administration — including the Justice Department — and the Trump campaign are willing to use sketchy allegations in an effort to undermine confidence in mail-in voting. That effort is itself part of an obvious move by the Trump campaign to delegitimize valid ballots out of concern that those ballots will tend to favor Trump’s opponent. That’s why rejecting “naked ballots” was a win for Trump’s team in the first place: it would probably lead to more votes for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden being thrown out in a pivotal swing state, precisely the outcome Trump’s party wanted.

Shorter: 9 ballots were discarded because they were believed to have violated rules that Republicans sued to have in place, all of which Trump/ Barr/ Republicans will now use to gaslight mail- in voting.  

 

Here's that DOJ update https://t.co/4oZamK7ssE

Pretty clear the problem here wasn't absentee voting, which is routine for military personnel, but rather the new (and controversial) ruling that requires ballots be placed in privacy envelopes. More on that: https://t.co/hb4I2EmQiq

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) September 25, 2020

From that story. Pennsylvania Republicans wanted those ballots thrown out. https://t.co/XW9HRV9Zit pic.twitter.com/PiazXZidKX

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) September 25, 2020

 

Even by Trump standards this is cynical bullshit, and it should be presumed at this point that any statement from Bill Barr’s doj or the White House is a lie of commission or omission until proven otherwise.

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) September 25, 2020