Trump’s Lawsuit Building The Case For Discrediting The Election

Credit Donald Trump with this much: When he finds a riff, he sticks with it.

For the better part of four years now, despite an utter paucity of evidence, the nation’s 45th president has claimed that our electoral system is so rife with voter fraud results cannot be trusted.

The opening salvo came in 2016 when Trump claimed that between 3 million and 5 million votes were illegally cast.

The former number, by the way, represents Hillary Clinton’s victorious margin in the popular vote. But we’re sure that was sheer coincidence. In 2018, a specially convened presidential commission found no evidence of any wrongdoing, an outcome that proved more speed bump than unscalable barrier to future fraud claims.

“Absentee Ballots are fine. A person has to go through a process to get and use them,” Trump thundered in a June 28 Tweet. “Mail-In Voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election is USA history. Bad things happen with Mail-Ins.”

Trump’s claims about mail-in balloting are “wrong and if used to prevent states from taking the steps needed to ensure public safety during November’s election, they will be deadly wrong. Mail ballot fraud is incredibly rare, and legitimate security concerns can be easily addressed,” the Brennan Center at New York University wrote in an April 10 analysis.

Now that effort, once merely offensive and dangerous, has been weaponized.

On Monday, Trump's re-election campaign, joined by four Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania, sued the state’s Secretary of State's Office and the election boards in all 67 counties, seeking to change the way mail-in ballots are sent and counted.

The lawsuit alleges the current system jeopardized election security by, for example, setting up in-person ballot drop off boxes. Never mind the fact that counties run by Republicans and Democrats alike had utilized such boxes.

To be sure, the state has plenty of kinks to iron out before November. But based on anecdotal and first-hand reporting, while there were problems during Pennsylvania’s primary, there was hardly the chaos seen in Georgia or Wisconsin.

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