In an Election Day ruling, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the U.S. Postal Service to immediately inspect facilities across the country for any mail-in ballots that have potentially been left behind. Amidst nationwide delays in mail service under the Trump-allied Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, concerns have swirled about whether ballots would be delayed by the Postal Service and subsequently kept out of the final count by election authorities because of arriving after the deadline. By 4:30 P.M. Eastern time on Tuesday, Sullivan demanded an update from the Postal Service to confirm that “no ballots were left behind,” and he said that any ballots that were discovered during the sweeps that he ordered must be “immediately sent out for delivery.”
BREAKING: U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan orders USPS to sweep facilities for remaining mail ballots and immediately send them for delivery pic.twitter.com/pBvJRmzcqi
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) November 3, 2020
Sullivan listed Postal Service facilities across the country in his demand for immediate sweeps for any left behind ballots. The list of Postal Service facilities where Sullivan demanded immediate searches for potentially overlooked ballots ranged from Philadelphia to Atlanta to south Florida and stretched out west, to Colorado/ Wyoming and Arizona. Some of these areas could be critical additions to the winning coalition of whichever candidate wins the election, and in 2016, Trump won a slew of states by strikingly thin margins. Thus, ballots that get unfairly left out of final tallies could have a major impact on the election and presidency — and Democrats have tended to favor mail-in voting, meaning that the impact of delayed ballots could favor Donald Trump.
Trump has already threatened to go after late-arriving ballots. Despite the long precedent of significant delays between Election Day and official certifications of presidential election results in states across the country, Trump has repeatedly punitively insisted that the election must be decided by November 3. Counting all valid votes should not be a controversial position!
Speaking to reporters before a recent rally in North Carolina, Trump insisted that his team would have lawyers ready to go after ballot-counting taking place after Election Day. He ranted:
‘I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election [on] the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers. I think it’s a terrible thing… I think a lot of fraud and misuse can take place… we’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers… if people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before that.’
Watch Trump’s threatening comments below:
The quiet part, screamed: Trump tells reporters that "we're going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over [in PA], we're going in with our lawyers … if people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before that." pic.twitter.com/sAMA0Pw6Tg
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2020
Trump has consistently claimed that there is some kind of danger of massive fraud in this election. His claims are baseless.
