The Trump campaign has been urgently seeking volunteers to call Pennsylvania Republicans who didn't return their absentee ballots to mail them in. It's unlikely to work, but it is election fraud. The deadline for ballots to be mailed in Pennsylvania was Tuesday, Nov. 3. The campaign sent out an email from its Wisconsin staff, saying: "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!" it concluded. The problem is, it can't unless there's a really big conspiracy to get those ballots injected into the system, one that would involve postal workers or the election observers inside canvassing rooms. They would need the postal workers to illegally manufacture fraudulent postmarks on the ballots. Or they would need someone in the rooms where they count the ballots who could smuggle them in and slip them into the process. Nevertheless, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that "dozens" of staff of Wisconsin's Republican Party were involved in the effort to recruit volunteers.
"This seems deeply stupid as it seems to be a solicitation to commit voter fraud," Richard Hasen, elections law specialist at the University of California, Irvine Law School, told the paper. "It's hard to believe this is real." It's more likely an effort to try to spoil all the mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania by injecting these fraudulent ones into the mix so that the Trump campaign could have "real" evidence that there's fraud to boost their chances of getting the Supreme Court to toss out the Pennsylvania results. Benjamin Geffen, an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, pointed this out: "If you're knowingly encouraging people to mail in ballots after the deadline, you're encouraging cheating," Geffen said. "But maybe it's just to muddy the waters." He added: "I don't know if it's what you could call first degree misconduct, (trying to actually get invalid votes counted) or just second degree misconduct, trying to create perception the process is riddled with fraud."
Because Trump, his campaign, and the Supreme Court conservatives raised so much hell about the deadline for mail-in ballots being extended through end of the day Friday, Pennsylvania officials ordered counties to make sure those late-arriving ballots were segregated from Election Day ballots, to ensure they were walled off from Trumpian mischief. So you can bet these ballots are getting an awful lot of scrutiny, with their postmarks being closely checked and double-checked.
Meanwhile, a sweep of postal facilities on Thursday found 1,000 ballots in Philadelphia facilities and 300 in Pittsburgh. Since the Wisconsin Republican voter fraud initiative started Thursday, these are probably not those ballots.
This is a deeply stupid effort, so much so that you have to wonder if Sen. Ron “Genius” Johnson in Wisconsin didn’t cook it up. It’s exposing potentially dozens of people to prosecution for election fraud. And it’s proving once again that systemic voter fraud is entirely manufactured by Republicans, to prove that voter fraud is a real thing.