President Trump has been striving for months to undercut Americans’ confidence in the integrity of the 2020 election, claiming without evidence that fraud is common, especially when voting by mail or casting ballots in drop boxes.
Trump pushes this often-debunked notion at his raucous rallies — and his campaign has filed lawsuits in several states, seeking to limit voter options (and, apparently, voting itself) before Nov. 3.
But federal judges across the country just aren’t buying it, reports BuzzFeed News.
That’s largely because actual fraud is very rare.
In fact, until this year it was Justice Department policy to block voter-fraud investigations in the run-up to an election “for fear that they could depress voter turnout or erode confidence in the results, or that the inquiry could itself become a campaign issue,” said the New York Times.
Some judges around the country clearly suspect that this year, depressing voter turnout and eroding confidence is Trump’s purpose.
Those judges include some Trump appointees, like U.S. District Judge Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh, who on Saturday threw out a suit filed by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
The suit “challenged some of Pennsylvania’s plans to make it easier for residents to vote remotely during the coronavirus pandemic,” BuzzFeed says.
“Specifically, Trump and the RNC argued the state shouldn’t be able to set up drop boxes where voters can return ballots” instead of using the U.S. Postal Service.
Judge Ranjan rejected that view, ruling that the plaintiffs had failed to show that fraud was an “impending” threat.
“They haven’t met that burden. At most, they have pieced together a sequence of uncertain assumptions,” wrote Ranjan.
The Trump campaign and RNC vowed to appeal, saying they want to “protect Pennsylvania voters from the Democrats’ radical voting system.”
The story has been much the same in other states, including Montana, Nevada and New Jersey, where judges rejected such Republican lawsuits, and in related developments elsewhere across the country.
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post said it had “tallied 14 rulings in which federal or state judges declined to embrace the GOP’s arguments or dismissed them outright as speculative, overly general and lacking proof.”
“Republican argumentsabout alleged fraud in mail voting — especially Trump’s claim that despite safeguards, mail ballots can be used to manipulate elections on a grand scale — have been largely unsuccessful in persuading judges,” the Post said.
