Senator Robert Ritter in Pennsylvania and the Case for Mail-in Voting: A View from the United States Election Project (USAEP)

The area’s Republican Party had sued to prevent the voter outreach. One of the latest standoffs at the local level in Pennsylvania was about the handling of mailed-in ballots.

The fate of what are often called “undated ballots” may affect the state’s final midterm results, including for a closely watched race for an open U.S. Senate seat.

The Supreme Court voided the lower court ruling after David Ritter, the Republican candidate, conceded the county judge’s race.

The United States Election Project analyzed data from other states and found that registered Democrats have turned in more mail ballots than Republicans. Many Republicans have been pushing back on the expansion of voting by mail since the 2020 elections, driven in part by misinformation about the security of mail ballots.

Samuel Alito, who was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote that it appears to him that the 3rd Circuit panel interpretation of the Civil Rights Act is very likely wrong.

Is the midterm election in Pennsylvania corrupt? Reply to Trump’s column on “Pathers and Senators are lying about the election”

Former President Donald Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. Here we go again! he wrote. The election was corrupted.

Is it true that Trump has evidence? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. Rather, the article baselessly raised suspicion about absentee-ballot data the article did not clearly explain.

Trump and his allies spent months laying the groundwork for their false claims that the election was stolen, in an effort to undermine the presidential election results. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

Pennsylvania could determine the control of the US Senate, and it’s not the only Republican trying to spread suspicion about it.

On a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania said that it could take days to complete the vote count after the acting elections chief told NBC News it could be done in days.

It isn’t. It simply takes time to count votes – especially, as Chapman noted, because the Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a no-strings-attached bill to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than the morning of Election Day.

On Election night, some Republican counties in Texas do not finish their vote counts due to a quirk in the electoral process. In fact, it is impossible for many counties to have final counts on election night.

Cruz’s claim that the big cities that skew Democratic have more votes to count than the small rural counties that are republican is false.

American elections authorities do not declare winners or official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.

The Detroit Politics: Obstructions to In-person Absentee Ballot Requests in a 2020 Senior General Election Race

There are health issues of the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, as well as doubts about the possible outcome.

After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, some right-wing personalities insisted the election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate. Tucker Carlson, prime-time host at Fox, argued on last week’s show that people shouldn’t accept a Fetterman win in Pennsylvania because it would be “transparently absurd” for him to do so.

But there would be nothing suspicious about Fetterman winning in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The city of Detroit has been targets of false 2020 conspiracy theories because of its large Black population. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, filed a lawsuit asking a court to “halt” the use of absentee ballots in Detroit if they weren’t obtained in person at a clerk’s office and declare that only those ballots obtained via in-person requests can be “validly voted” in this election. That request would potentially mean the rejection of thousands of votes already cast legally by Detroit residents – in state whose constitution gives residents the right to request absentee ballots by mail.

The lawyer for Karamo vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.

Other Republican candidates have vaguely hinted at the possibility that Democrats might somehow cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”

The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. He told the same story in June.

There is no basis in the idea that many fraudulent votes could be added to a state’s count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

Fetterman and the Democrats filed a new lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District stating that the date instruction would make it hard for eligible Pennsylvanians to cast valid votes.

“As we fight this latest Republican attack on Americans’ democratic rights, Pennsylvanians should check their ballot status to ensure their vote is counted. We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to protect Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to participate in this election, including defeating the GOP in court,” the groups said in a joint statement.

Democrats have their sights set on flipping seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both places that were won by President Joe Biden in 2020, in order to try and keep their majority in the Senate.

A Circuit Court Judge Ordered to Order a Defective Mail-in Voting System in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, to Arrigate

Earlier Monday, a judge in Monroe County in Northeast Pennsylvania decided that election officials could notify the few hundred voters there whose mail-in ballots were submitted with errors, to give them a chance to correct them.

Zulick noted that the Republicans who brought the case said at a hearing that they had no issue with voters correcting defective ballots if they were handing a ballot over in person, “across the counter.”