A group called Kenosha for Trump recently sent emails asking for volunteers to help get Pennsylvania voters to return their absentee/ mail-in ballots by Friday… and these emails went out after Election Day. If voters were to follow through on the mission outlined in the email, they would be committing fraud. Although in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the country ballots could be counted if arriving back at election authorities’ headquarters after Election Day itself had passed, these ballots must be sent by Election Day to be valid.
In the email, Kenosha for Trump — whose name references the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin — claimed that they were contacting voters on behalf of Trump Victory, the official campaign committee that was jointly established by the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign. They told recipients to contact field directors named Riley Pella and Joshua Williams for more information — and both of these individuals are paid staffers with the Wisconsin Republican Party, suggesting a serious degree of official coordination in this effort to get Pennsylvania voters to commit fraud. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a source revealed that “[dozens] of Republican staffers in Wisconsin were involved in the operation to recruit volunteers to contact Trump supporters in Pennsylvania.”
Benjamin Geffen, who works as an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia, suggested to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the effort could have been meant, at least in part, to create an appearance of fraud surrounding the electoral process in Pennsylvania, even if no fraud actually took place. Republicans have challenged the extension of the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots to be counted in Pennsylvania — even though the Trump campaign seems to have been encouraging voters to utilize that extended deadline, based on this newly revealed volunteer recruitment effort. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the Republican request to do away with the extended deadline — but local authorities have been ordered to keep ballots arriving after Election Day separate from the rest of them.
Geffen, meanwhile, commented as follows:
‘If you’re knowingly encouraging people to mail in ballots after the deadline, you’re encouraging cheating. But maybe it’s just to muddy the waters. 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.’
The Trump campaign has made numerous allegations of fraud as results have continued to come in that definitely aren’t in the president’s favor. Trump and his allies have yet to produce any kind of conclusive evidence of the kind of systematic fraud that they have alleged. Why should they even be taken seriously to begin with, when they’ve outright lied so obsessively in the past?
The Trump campaign’s legal challenges have frequently come up short. In the lead-up to Election Day, they sought to get a court to force Nevada authorities to stop using a particular signature scanning machine while processing ballots, but that demand was denied. After Election Day, the campaign tried to get a court to force Michigan to stop counting ballots until the Republicans got the observation access that they wanted, but that request was also denied.
