An Example of Attempted Election Interference
Six GOP members of the House are targeting military ballots.
Via the Philadelphia Inquirer: Six GOP congressmen sue to have Pa. military and overseas ballots set aside in November election.
Six Republican members of Congress are suing the Pennsylvania Department of State, arguing that ballots from overseas voters — including members of the U.S. military — are susceptible to fraud because those voters are not subject to ID requirements applied to U.S.-based absentee voters.
None of the six lawmakers, who represent Pennsylvania, voted to certify the 2020 election results, and the lawyers working with them were involved in the election-denial efforts in 2020.
Several election-law experts called the suit a voter-suppression play that faces little chance in court given its last-minute filing before the highly consequential presidential election in Pennsylvania.
There was a time when the overseas ballots of members of the armed services were treated as almost sacrosanct. That Americans serving in uniform away from home had a sacred right to have their ballots counted just like the rest of us comfortably voting from home.
But, I guess, when Pennsylvania in on the line, and could be the linchpin of it all, a bunch of Representatives who didn’t respect the voters in 2020 are more than happy to take fake “election integrity” arguments and apply them to the ballots of service members.
“This is not designed to fix a problem that actually exists,” David Becker, of the nonpartisan Center for Election and Innovation, said of the lawsuit. He sees it as a move to sow distrust ahead of the election.
[…]
“This is a dangerous political stunt,” Becker said. “If Congress thought UOCAVA needed clarification or additional requirements, what have they been doing? It’s just an incredible self-indictment of their legislative responsibilities.”
I would note that Republicans are constantly the ones trying to make it harder to vote. They are constantly willing to risk disenfranchising American citizens in the name of “election integrity.”
See, also, this DOJ press release: Justice Department Sues Virginia for Violating Federal Law’s Prohibition on Systematic Efforts to Remove Voters Within 90 Days of an Election.None of the is about election “integrity”–it is about a systematic hope that such maneuvers will deny more likely Democratic voters than Republicans ones from being able to vote. And, beyond that, it is simply the case that voters should have a reasonable opportunity to correct their registration if the state incorrectly purges them from the rolls. That’s why doing it at the last minute is a problem.
Moreover, all of these actions help feed a narrative of doubt about our elections, which is corrosive in and of itself.
Yup, we’ll send you off to die for your country, but don’t count on voting.
I think the real news here is that this suggests Republicans think they’ve lost the support of the military.
At least one of the six Trump-loyalist congressman may be on the way out. Scott Perry is a prominent election denier whose cell phone was seized as part of a warrant obtained by the FBI. Perry is now trailing in polls to Janelle Stelson, who is familiar face in the Susquehanna Valley as a long-time TV news anchor on the local NBC affiliate. It’s been reported that Stelson was formerly a registered Republican and that she retired from TV news to run for Congress.
In 1988 I was serving in the Navy and stationed at Subic Bay Naval Base. I was unable to cast a ballot in either the general election or run off even though I had an absentee ballot request in. Trouble is both elections were held 4-5 weeks after a previous one. It takes time for ballots to be printed and then mailed overseas. Mail to the Philippines took at least a week and you’re lucky if something didn’t get lost on the way there. My primary runoff ballot did. As for the general election, it arrived on November 1 or 2 and I mailed it the next day or two. No way it was back to Palm Beach in time to be counted.
In 80, 82, 84, and 86 I was more fortunate. I was stationed stateside.
@Bill Jempty: While I was living in Korea, I never requested absentee ballots because mail delivery is so irregular there. Sometimes letters from home would arrive in 3 or 4 days, other times they took two weeks. My favorite situation of this sort was the time I had ordered transcripts because I had taken a teaching job at a new school. The school sent them express mail. They arrived in Busan 48 hours later, cleared customs the next day. Korea Express Mail Service delivered them 10 days later to the third largest city in the nation. Never seen anything like it–before or since.
But Koreans swear by (not at) the Post Office Bank system. Much better than the letter delivery one.
I was an ex-pat a few times.
I had marketable skills in an obscure tech fissure, IT niche.
I sort of spoke toddler level Swedish, and then mostly swears and gross insults thanks to my great-grandfather. But it was way more Swedish than anybody else applying close to reqs.
Mostly, it didn’t matter. Many of my colleagues were fully fluent English speakers. If I was confused I asked. I made sure to always ask for repeated conformation and that I was on the path they intended.
My closest friend collegue there told me that I spoke Swedish like a drunk toddler one drunken night. I fucking love that. And I own that. It’s totally true.
Hey, it got me a gig in Reykjavik. Drunk, toddler level Swedish. For a bank in Iceland that no longer exists. I spent most of a year in Reykjavik making dashboards and drill-downs for a bank. I had the requisite skills (more, frankly) in a fairly small field, but that smidgen of Swedish got me two big gigs.
(Icelandic is close enough to Swedish so you get the gist almost always. A lot of it is almost identical, not in spelling, but pronounced. Way closer than Spanish and Portuguese.)
I spent at least 4 hours a day on Icelandic language after work every day and every day I interacted with colleagues that had nearly perfect English. I felt so inadequate.
@Stormy Dragon: Military ballots are in a quantum superposition between sacred and fraudulent, and the wave form will only collapse to one or the other after Election Day, as benefits the electoral or propaganda aspects of the Republican Party.
Also, if the Democrats agreed to do anything to make sure that the military ballots were secure, they would be immediately castigated as hating the military, even if they just agreed to a Republican proposal.
@Sleeping Dog:..Yup, we’ll send you off to die for your country, but don’t count on voting.
These Republican palookas want to take us back to pre Twenty-sixth Amendment* America. A time when male citizens were drafted into the Armed Services at the age of 18 to get their heads blown off in the jungle but they couldn’t vote the bastards out of office who were doing this to them until they were 21.
*Ratified 1971.