I don’t know if the Trump campaign is trying to prove a point or trying to steal an election, but a campaign message to Wisconsin voters was looking for volunteers to call Pennsylvania voters in hopes of urging them to mail in absentee ballots by Friday, a desperate attempt to either expose a perceived flaw in mail-in voting or take advantage of it.
The president (for now) has been railing against late votes. The president (sitting president for a few more months) has watched his early lead slip as mail-in ballots continue to be counted.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “under a federal court ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, absentee ballots received by 5 p.m. Friday can be counted in Pennsylvania.”
Those votes had to be mailed by Nov. 3 and received by Friday. The problem, as Trump and his sycophants see it, because the ballots don’t have to be postmarked they can be mailed on Friday. As if people are still, in fact, voting on Friday, which is actually illegal.
Did I mention that Trump isn’t reading on grade level? We will come back to this.
From the Sentinel:
That ruling said ballots received by that point without postmarks, or with illegible postmarks, will be considered to have been mailed in time “unless a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that it was mailed after Election Day.”
An email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sent at 5:19 p.m. Thursday by Kenosha for Trump is headlined “Volunteers Urgently Needed.”
It reads: “Trump Victory urgently needs volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots. These phone calls will help President Trump win the election!”
Richard Hasen, a noted elections law specialist at the University of California, Irvine Law School, told the Sentinel that all of this is “deeply stupid.”
“This seems deeply stupid as it seems to be a solicitation to commit voter fraud,” Hasen said. “It’s hard to believe this is real.”
I’m not sure what part of “has to be received by Friday,” not, “mailed by Friday” is difficult to understand. Pennsylvania isn’t allowing voting to drag on; the state is merely allowing votes that have been mailed in to be received and counted.
“It is a fairly unimpressive scheme if it is a scheme,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice under the Obama administration, told the Sentinel.
Levitt added that the “email could be the basis for a criminal investigation under the section of federal civil rights law that forbids ‘conspiracies to encourage illegal voting.’ But he added it would be a tough case to prove, the Sentinel reports.
“If you think Pennsylvania really does have three extra days, this is not a crazy email to send,” Levitt said. “It is wrong and is unlawful ... but it does not have the hallmarks of a mastermind scheme.”
Who said anything about mastermind? Lol, these are idiots doing idiot shit.