President Donald Trump is obsessed with the idea of encouraging e-mail voting in voter fraud, and his campaign has filed lawsuits against Pennsylvania and other states over their plans to encourage voters to use e-mail voting in the November election. Journalist Richard Salame reports in The Intercept that in response to the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Trump’s campaign was asked to show evidence that postal voting encourages voter fraud – and it could not.
Salame notes that Trump’s campaign “is suing Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s election boards to prevent election officials from providing safe dropboxes for returning messages.” Two of the groups that support mail in Pennsylvania, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club, called on the Trump campaign to demonstrate that there is a link between mail-in-the-vote and voter fraud – and Judge J Nicholas Ranjan upheld her motion, asking the campaign to “produce such evidence in her possession, and if she did not have it, steal so much.”
The Trump campaign produced a 524-page document in response to Ranjan’s request, and The Intercept received a copy. According to Salame, the document contains “a few brief examples of election fraud” – but none of them are actually about mail-in-votes.
Salame explained:
The unreformed part of the Trump campaign’s response consists of a large portion of new messages and copies of the open records requests for the campaign to counties. It does not contain any new evidence of fraud beyond what local news outlets have previously reported. The examples of fraud it provides include the case of four poll workers who allowed harassment and intimidation of voters at one polling station during a special election in 2017. It also includes an election judge who changed total votes in his polling station between 2014 and 2016 at the request of a political adviser. And although the modified complaint brought by the campaign cites a few incidents of mail-in fraud, none were mentioned in the discovery document.
This is far from the first time Republicans have failed to support their frequent claims that voter fraud is a persistent problem in U.S. elections. In 2018, one of the 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 non-citizens voted in his home state of Kansas. Kobach brought witnesses, but their testimony fell apart on cross-examination. Judge Julie Robinson wrote in her opinion that “evidence that voter roles include unreachable citizens is weak. At most, 39 [non]citizens have found their way onto the Kansas constituencies for the past 19 years. “The rare known cases of voter fraud were not the tip of the iceberg,” she concluded, “there is no iceberg; only an ice cold, largely caused by confusion and administrative error. “
Another group that is opposed to Trump’s campaign in the lawsuit PA is Common Cause. Salame quoted Suzanne Almeida, the group’s interim director, as saying, “Not only did the campaign fail to provide evidence that voter fraud was a widespread problem in Pennsylvania – it failed to provide evidence that any misconduct occurred in the primary. elections or that so-called voter fraud is any kind of regular problem in Pennsylvania. “
