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Sunday, November 22, 2020

Rudy Melts Down Amid Republican Campaign to Disenfranchise Voters

In trying to steal the 2020 election, the Trump campaign must be getting tired of all that losing. A conservative Republican Pennsylvania judge just tossed out Trump's case, ridiculing Trump's legal team. In particular, Rudy Giuliani is doing an absolutely abysmal job while literally melting down.

The Trump campaign’s main argument challenges an email that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sent to county-level voting officials, encouraging those officials to “provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected,” so that those voters can be notified that they made an error while submitting those ballots, and will have the opportunity to cure that error.

As it turns out, not all counties took this advice. The Trump campaign claims that Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, notified voters that they needed to cure errors in their absentee ballots, while county officials in Republican-leaning counties did not. Thus, the campaign claims, absentee ballots cast in Biden-friendly Philadelphia were more likely to be counted than ballots cast in more Trump-friendly regions of the state — and this discrepancy amounts to unconstitutional discrimination.

The judge dismissed this argument as total crap. The Republican officials who didn't allow ballot curing were the ones doing the unconstitutional discrimination: suppressing Democratic votes to steal the election. 

Trump has been doing everything in his power to discourage Republicans from voting by mail, encouraging them to vote in person on election day (and to vote twice, causing even more mayhem and confusion on election day). That means absentee ballots are going to skew Democratic. 

Republican county officials refused to allow absentee ballots to be "cured," knowing that they were more than likely to be Democratic.

There's nothing at all wrong with curing ballots. It's done all the time: when you vote in person your ballot is run through the tabulator, and if there are any inconsistencies the machine spits it out and you get a new ballot. This is almost always innocent: for example, accidentally voting for two judges in the same race, which is really easy to do when there are like 20 judge races, most of which only have one candidate.

Republican officials -- intentionally disregarding instructions from the secretary of state -- prevented voters from fixing erroneous mail-in ballots stole votes from people who made trivial clerical errors.

Those Republican officials should be prosecuted for disenfranchising voters. But, like always, the Republicans are trying to their own crimes to their advantage.

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