If you incite a riot, that’s a crime. If you suborn perjury, that’s a crime. And if you participate in a multi-state conspiracy to engage in election fraud … that’s definitely a crime. On Thursday evening, it became clear that Trump’s campaign had attempted to get Wisconsin voters to contact Trump supporters in Pennsylvania with the apparent goal of adding late submissions to the stack of mail-in ballots. It seems like a pointless effort, as ballots postmarked after Election Day are not valid. Unless, of course, the goal was really just to throw another monkey wrench into Pennsylvania’s counting by claiming that election authorities are not properly filtering out late ballots.
But if that seems a little too complicated, this isn’t: Trump campaign officials and Minnesota Republicans are encouraging Trump supporters to make claims about ballot fraud, even when they have no evidence of ballot fraud, with promises that the campaign and the RNC will back them up.
As the Minnesota Reformer reports, Minnesota GOP chair Jennifer Carnahan appeared on an invite-only Zoom meeting with Republican activists on Thursday night, and told them that the party would back their play if they made claims of ballot fraud, even if there was no basis for those claims. And Carnahan made it clear she didn’t mean just local support. In fact, she told the Trump activists, this wasn’t a Minnesota thing, but a plan from Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel.
According to Carnahan, McDaniel put out a request for “GOP officials around the country” to recruit Republicans to make false claims of ballot fraud. She made it clear the party would amplify any claims of ballot fraud, as part of a plan to back Trump’s false claims.
Trump’s loss in Minnesota was huge—over 230,000 votes—so any claims of ballot fraud there might not directly suggest a change in the outcome. But it would help to promote Trump’s false claims of fraud in other areas. And, as Carnahan made clear, this same call was going out to Trump activists in other areas with the goal of creating a chorus of false claims.
The Zoom call took place as the numbers in Pennsylvania were shifting rapidly. With Trump’s early lead vanishing as mail-in ballots were added to the totals, and it was clear that Joe Biden was about to tip over the 270 electoral vote threshold. Unknown to Republican officials, a reporter for the Minnesota Reformer became aware of the Zoom call, registered for the meeting, and listened in to the entire appeal.
Attempting to vote multiple times is fraud. Attempting to alter ballots is fraud. Deliberately discarding submitted ballots is fraud. But claiming that election fraud occurred when it did not is also election fraud. And encouraging thousands of activists across the nation to engage in deliberately fraudulent conspiracy puts the RNC and chair Ronna McDaniel at the center of a genuine “vast right-wing conspiracy” that demands to be given swift attention by both state and federal law enforcement.