He couldn’t
By Alex Henderson
for Alternet
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President Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea that mail-in voting encourages voter fraud, and his campaign has filed lawsuits against Pennsylvania and other states because of their plans to encourage voters to use mail-in ballots in November’s election.
Journalist
Richard Salame, in The Intercept,
reports that in response to the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Trump’s campaign was
asked to show proof that voting by mail encourages voter fraud — and it was
unable to.
Salame
notes that Trump’s 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.”
Two
of the groups that support voting by mail in Pennsylvania, Citizens for
Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club, asked the Trump campaign to
demonstrate that there is a connection between mail-in voting and voter fraud —
and Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted their motion, asking the campaign to
“produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as
much.”
The
Trump campaign produced a 524-page document in response to Ranjan’s request,
and The Intercept obtained a copy. According to Salame, the document “contains
a few scant examples of election fraud” — but none of them actually involve
mail-in ballots.
Salame
explained:
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.
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.”
Another
group opposing Trump’s campaign in the lawsuit is Common Cause PA. Salame
quotes 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 — 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.”