The Pennsylvania case, on which the Supreme Court could rule: electoral law and Constitution violated, 700,000 votes contested
This is why the "universal" postal vote is a Pandora's box, intrinsically unreliable, does not guarantee freedom and secrecy and is a source of fraud and coercion. The Pennsylvania case, where the state Supreme Court extended the statutory deadline for accepting ballots by mail by three days and the State Department allowed, contra legem, to open the envelopes before election day and correct the formal defects in Dem majority counties
As much as the mainstream media refuses to accept it, and tries to overshadow President Trump's legal offensive, the reality is that we are in the midst of a contested election. Of course, both the assignment game during the night of November 3 and the hasty media proclamation of Biden as president-elect aimed to confront the country, public opinion and institutions with a fait accompli, well before it was reasonable to "call ”A winner. As expected, the narrative of Trump as a "coup leader" and agitator, which the Democrats and the supporting media have been preparing for months, is triggered, but the reality is that there is nothing scandalous or dangerous about an outgoing president who goes to the courts for contest alleged irregularities in the vote. It is his right to do so, there will be a legal process, it will run its course, and the will of the media to ignore it, to ignore any element supporting the appeals, refusing to even contemplate the hypothesis, it is not journalism, it is political activism.
Scandalous and dangerous, if anything, it is activating intelligence agencies and the media with false accusations set up to delegitimize an elected president, as did Clinton and the Democrats four years ago, with the complicity of the Obama administration. Those who accuse Trump today of not wanting to "concede" victory to Biden are the same ones who for three and a half years, without a shred of evidence and on the basis of fake dossiers and leaks , have fueled the stolen election hoax by Trump with the help of the Russians.
We have already observed in recent days how close the legal path for Trump was : to date the hopes of overturning the result of the presidential elections by contesting the vote in the courts, for a series of reasons ranging from the difficulty of proving massive and decisive fraud. , having to do it in several states in a few days.
However, the fact remains that every observer with common sense and intellectual honesty should not ignore the opacity of the ballot in the states in the balance, where the counting of votes has been repeatedly stopped and resumed, pending the arrival of further ballots. hours and days after the polls closed, and where the GOP observers were ousted. It is not a question of advancing conspiracy theories, but of recognizing the inherent unreliability of the postal vote, which in these elections, with the excuse of Covid , by the will of the Democrats was made "universal", from exception to rule, in many states.
A Pandora's box that risks undermining the credibility of the American electoral process. In fact, voting by post does not protect freedom and secrecy, there is no real guarantee as to who has filled in and posted the card, it lends itself to heavy "environmental" conditioning and the exchange vote, to loss and discovery, votes attributed to people deceased for years or no longer residents. And we Italians should know this well. Let's be honest: if someone in Italy proposed to extend the vote by mail from Italians abroad (where irregularities are proven) to the whole country, to avoid gatherings at the seats, he would be immediately accused of wanting to favor the patronage vote, the swap vote , corruption and mafias.
Imagine if in Italy 40 million ballots were sent by post, weeks and weeks before the vote, without cleaning up the electoral lists of deceased or no longer residents (someone lost a referendum…). Imagine that in some regions, even those that return without postmark, without voter identification details, without signature and sender address are counted.
Of course, the inherent unreliability of postal voting is not in itself sufficient to prove systematic fraud in court. But can we close our eyes to these issues just because Trump raised them? This is what the US and Italian mainstream media did during the electoral campaign and are still doing.
A bipartisan commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, Attorney General William Barr recalled in an interview last September, said in 2009 that voting by mail is "full of risks of fraud and coercion", and so they also argued print to academic studies. "The narrative changed when this administration came along." There has been no widespread fraud in the past because voting by mail was not yet as extensive as it is proposed today. Barr then explained the difference between absentee ballots, requested by people from a specific address, and voting by post, in which ballots are sent indiscriminately, without the need to apply, to all those registered on the electoral lists, notoriously uncleaned. of deceased and no longer residents. The people who propose to adopt this method, Barr warned, are "playing with fire."
The Pennsylvania case differs from appeals in other states because the issues here are constitutional and there is a good chance the Supreme Court will decide to speak out.
Last Monday the Trump Campaign filed a long appeal (86 pages) with the federal court, accusing Pennsylvania of the violation, in the management of the vote, of the Equal Protection Clause contained in the XIV Amendment of the Constitution, the same on the basis of which in 2000 the Court Suprema spoke out in favor of Bush against Gore regarding the counting of votes in Florida. Almost 700,000 votes in the mail and absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh County) are targeted.
The appeal accuses state officials and courts of having established, de facto, "an illegal dual standard electoral system," which discriminated against voters by voting method, between votes cast in person and votes by mail, and preferences, between Democrats and Republicans. Of course, votes in person and by mail cannot be treated exactly the same, being of a different nature. But the complaint underlines that some differences in treatment are arbitrary and contradictory, providing for lower standards to guarantee the integrity of the vote in the most risky voting method, that by correspondence.
In particular, the voters in person were subjected to a rigorous “matching” of signatures; they voted in a polling station monitored, in accordance with the law, by observers from both sides; "Their votes counted in a transparent and verifiable, open and observed way". On the contrary, it is claimed that Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar (Democrat) "affirmatively removed almost every element of transparency and verifiability" for the nearly 2.65 million votes by post: not requiring proper verification of the identity of the voter ; allowing the counting of ballots arriving up to three days after the closing of the polling stations, even without proof that they had been sent within the terms of the election day (a point which is the subject of an appeal already presented to the Supreme Court, to which we will return shortly); authorizing the verification and counting of such ballots "largely in secret, without the presence of observers".
The appeal also denounces irregularities in the preliminary process, during which the votes by post are inventoried and begin to be processed before the polls close on election day. In counties with a strong Democratic majority, observers would be given the opportunity to directly contact voters who had completed their ballots incorrectly (lack of the inner secrecy envelope or the voter's signature on the outer envelope). These voters, then, in Democratic-majority counties, would be allowed to correct defects that would lead to invalidating their vote, while voters in other counties would not be offered this opportunity. All this, among other things, violating the secrecy of the vote.
Circumstances confirmed to The Federalist by Joe Kantz, chair of the Snyder County Election Commission, who reported last minute changes made to the election process by the Pennesylvania Election Secretary, suggesting violations of the Equal Protection Clause and the Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution. On the morning of the vote, he said, a Democratic observer pressured him to be provided with the identification numbers of voters who had not put their ballot in the inner secret envelope, or who had not signed the outer envelope, as required by state law. under penalty of invalidation of the vote.
In an email the previous evening, in effect, the deputy secretary of state for elections had authorized the electoral commissions of the counties to provide representatives of candidates and parties with information about the voters whose ballots had been rejected in the mail, contrary to the Pennsylvania Electoral Law.
According to the appeal, among other things, Philadelphia County would have started the process of verifying the ballots sent by post before the election day , in violation of the state law that provides that the envelopes are not opened before 7 am of the day. of the vote.
In short, in some counties with a strong Democratic majority, such as Philadelphia and Allegheny, voters were allowed to correct mistakes or vote again, while this did not happen in counties with a Republican majority, which have abided by the law, which prohibits opening the envelopes before the day of the vote and to provide the representatives of the candidates and parties with any information on the outcome of the ballot before the closing of the polling stations. And as some documents posted on social media also prove, Democrats had been warned in advance of the Pennsylvania State Department's last-minute guidelines contrary to the law.
In addition, the plaintiffs complain that throughout the process, in Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, the steps of "receiving, reviewing, opening and counting" ballot papers by mail were effectively hidden from authorized Trump campaign observers. The electoral officials, the appeal alleged, even "failed to comply" with a judge's injunction that he had agreed to allow observers to monitor the poll within six feet.
In essence, the appeal argues that Democratic voters have been granted unfair advantages, and that the process has been handled in a way that hides them.
A case similar to that of Florida in 2000, when the Supreme Court ordered the recount process ordered by the State Supreme Court to be stopped, finding that the way it was carried out led to highly discriminatory treatment between the ballots of different counties – and sometimes even within the same county.
In the case of the Florida recount in 2000, the Supreme Court argued that a treatment that has the effect of canceling the votes of some voters, or that favors some voters over others, is unconstitutional, blaming state authorities for not knowing ensure and apply uniform standards in scrutiny.
The main problem, highlighted at the time by the Supreme Court judges, was that the decisions of the state court had overridden the electoral rules promulgated by the Florida Legislature, while it is the latter, not the judiciary, which has the constitutional power to establish modalities and times when presidential elections are held.
Thus, if the factual claims contained in the appeal were to be substantiated, the Florida precedent could apply to the Pennsylvania case. And in particular, applied to the decision of the state Supreme Court which extended the deadline for receiving votes by post to three days after election day , contrary to the provisions of the law.
The matter is the subject of a petition that the Republicans had already presented to the Supreme Court, which had refused to express itself urgently before the elections, but had not rejected the case, which therefore remains open.
In 2019, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a law, "Act 77," to allow all voters to vote by mail, but (using Chief Justice Alito's words) "unequivocally required that all ballots for mail were received by 20:00 on election day ”. The exact text:
"No absentee ballot under this subsection shall be counted which is received in the office of the county board of elections later than eight o'clock PM on the day of the primary or election".
Unequivocal.
Act 77 also provided that if this part of the law were invalidated, the liberalization of voting by post would also be canceled.
"Sections 1, 2, 3, 3.2, 4, 5, 5.1, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 of this act are nonseverable. If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remaining provisions or applications of this act are void ".
But a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order ruled, in total contradiction to the law, that 1) ballots by mail can be accepted up to three days after the vote, if the postmark is on or before the vote day, and 2 ) cards sent by post without postmark or with illegible stamp must be accepted if received by the same date.
In practice, with the excuse of Covid , in Pennsylvania the state Supreme Court has rewritten the law, creating new rules on the timing and methods of conducting the vote, which by Constitution are up to the State Legislator, while the State Department which manages and supervises the election process significantly violated the law by allowing, among other things, the inspection of ballots by post before election day and for information about voters to be disclosed before polling stations close.
A Pennsylvania judge's order on Thursday stipulates that no votes are counted in the mail whose formal defects have been corrected after November 9. This is a first decision in favor of President Trump, significant not for the amount of votes involved, not decisive, but because it recognizes that the Secretary of State did not have the authority to extend the terms of acceptance of the ballots contrary to the electoral law. .
A Supreme Court ruling in favor of Trump on the Pennsylvania case would be extremely important for several reasons, even if it did not lead to a reversal of the presidential outcome. It would considerably reduce Biden's margins of victory by showing the validity of at least some claims in a key state; it would cast a shadow over the management of the postal vote also in the other states where Trump's advantage on the night of November 3 was overturned by a zero point; it would indicate minimum guarantees on voting by post in view of future elections.
The post The Pennsylvania case, on which the Supreme Court could rule: electoral law and Constitution violated, 700 thousand disputed votes appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-caso-pennsylvania-su-cui-potrebbe-pronunciarsi-la-corte-suprema-violate-legge-elettorale-e-costituzione-700-mila-voti-contestati/ on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 03:46:34 +0000.