Friday, November 6, 2020

USPS finds 1,700 ballots in Pennsylvania mail facilities after sweep

 

 

Politics

USPS finds 1,700 ballots in Pennsylvania mail facilities after sweep

The U.S. Postal Service said about 1,700 ballots had been identified in Pennsylvania at processing facilities during two sweeps Thursday and were being delivered to election officials.

 

Pennsylvania Democrats Accused of Violating Election Rules, Offering Ballot Info to Party Operatives

 

 

Politics

Pennsylvania Democrats Accused of Violating Election Rules, Offering Ballot Info to Party Operatives

Ryan Mills

Pennsylvania’s Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they authorized county election officials to provide information about rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.

The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvania’s deputy elections secretary.

In the email, Marks wrote that “county boards of elections should provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected” so they could be offered a provisional ballot.

Democrats have been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are key to Joe Biden’s chances of overtaking President Donald Trump’s dwindling lead in the state.

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Republicans argue the direction from Marks violates the state’s election code, which states “no person observing, attending or participating in a pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.”

In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday against Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar in part by two Republican state house candidates, the Republicans note that Pennsylvania’s supreme court stated last month that “unlike in-person voters, mail-in or absentee voters are not provided any opportunity to cure perceived defects (to their ballot) in a timely manner.”

But the Republicans argue that the opportunity to cure perceived defects for ballots that overwhelmingly support Democrats is exactly what Boockvar and Marks were allowing. Attempts to reach Boockvar and Marks for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful.

At least eight counties refused to accept Marks’ suggestion that they make voters aware of rejected ballots because doing so violates the state’s election code, according to the lawsuit.

The Monday night email is just one of several pieces of guidance by Democratic election leaders that Republicans say have been inconsistent and confusing.

Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP, said high-ranking state Democrats are using their positions to stack the deck against Republicans and President Donald Trump.

“They constantly are changing the rules,” he said. “They have been applying different standards, issuing guidances as they go, changing the rules as they go, and making it difficult for us to be able to establish that there is one clear, uniform standard of how to do this throughout the whole commonwealth. That’s what we want.”

Pennsylvania Republican leaders also have complained about inconsistent guidance to county election directors about segregating and processing mail ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Republicans are challenging a Pennsylvania supreme court ruling that allows for all mail-in ballots that arrive by 5 p.m. on Friday to be counted.

Just last year, the Pennsylvania legislature extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received from 5 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day to 8 p.m. on Election Day, the time that polls close for in-person voting. The state supreme court’s elected Democratic majority then further extended the deadline to the Friday after Election Day, a change the legislature had refused to make.

In the case of a dispute about when exactly a ballot was postmarked, or if it wasn’t postmarked at all, the state supreme court ruled that election officials are required to assume it was sent in by Election Day rather than rejecting it, as done under existing state law.

In early October, the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked on the case, but left open the possibility that the Court could reconsider it.

Pennsylvania officials have urged county election directors to keep late-arriving ballots segregated, but Republicans have said the instructions have been confusing.

State Senate majority leader Jake Corman said at a Wednesday press conference that he believed the State Department has been “weaponized” and influenced by partisan efforts to sway the vote, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

“All we want to do is have confidence in the result,” Corman said, according to the Post-Gazette. “We’ll have winners and we’ll have losers, but it seems to be the mission of the Democratic Party to cause confusion in this race.”

Boockvar responded that the state’s guidance has been clear.

“They don’t like the late counting of ballots because they don’t like anything that allows more eligible voters to be enfranchised,” she told the paper.

Tabas worries that without clear guidance about how to process late-arriving ballots, they could be co-mingled with ballots received by Election Day. That could be a problem if the Supreme Court rules that only ballots received by Election Day should count in the final tally.

“There was no clear indication as to how, during that processing, they could remain segregated so we could identify later which ones came in late and are included in the total or not,” he said.

Winning Pennsylvania is key for Trump to have any chance of holding the presidency. He was ahead by about a half-million votes Wednesday, but Biden has cut into his lead as more absentee ballots are counted. Trump’s lead was down to about 100,000 votes on Thursday afternoon.

Tabas said it’s not clear how many outstanding ballots have yet to be canvassed and counted, and it’s not clear how many ballots actually did arrive after Election Day.

He said he remains optimistic about Trump’s chances in the Keystone State, even though many elections experts are projecting that Biden will ultimately pull ahead.

Tabas said Trump “has done very well throughout the state, and part of our confidence and hope and optimism is, our statewide candidates are doing very well.”

“We’ve had greater turnout than expected in our strongholds on Election Day,” he said. “We’ve exceeded our expectations, in some cases very dramatically. Right now we are just waiting to see what is left to be counted and that the rules are being applied equally and uniformly.”

In addition to the lawsuit over ballot counting and the lawsuit over alleged violations of the state’s election code, the Trump campaign also has said it filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania because its poll watchers have not been actually able to observe ballot counting.

During a press conference Wednesday in Philadelphia, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, said poll observers are being kept so far back that they are “never able to see the ballot itself, never able to see if it was properly postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside, all of the things that often lead to the disqualification of ballots, or make it very easy to dump 50,000 totally fraudulent ballots because they’re not observed.”

“Not a single Republican has been able to look at any one of these mail-in ballots,” Giuliani said. “They could be from Mars as far as we’re concerned, or they could be from the Democratic National Committee. Joe Biden could have voted 50 times as far as we know, or 5,000 times.”

 

A 20-year-old Democrat who admitted to spreading revenge porn has been elected to the Kansas state House of Representatives

 

 

A 20-year-old Democrat who admitted to spreading revenge porn has been elected to the Kansas state House of Representatives

Ashley Collman
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  • Aaron Coleman, a 20-year-old progressive Democrat, won Tuesday's election to represent Kansas' 37th District in the state House of Representatives.

  • Coleman's campaign has ben plagued by scandal. In June, he admitted to spreading revenge porn and harassing girls online when he was 14, and in July, he made insensitive comments about the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • While Coleman initially dropped out of the race after beating seven-term incumbent Stan Frownfelter in an August primary, he decided two days later to continue his campaign.

  • However, Coleman had by then lost support of the state's Democratic Party, which scrambled to find a replacement, which included backing a write-in campaign for Frownfelter. 

  • On Election Day, Coleman ran unopposed in the Democratic stronghold district, winning 3,496 of the votes. More than 2,000 write-in votes were cast, but it's unclear what names were submitted. 

The 20-year-old Democrat who earlier admitted to circulating revenge porn and harassing girls online in middle school has won a seat in the Kansas state House of Representatives.

aaron coleman ex girlfriend
Aaron Coleman has won a seat in the Kansas state House of Representatives. Aaron Coleman for Kansas/Facebook

Aaron Coleman, a dishwasher and community college student, ran unopposed in Kansas' 37th District, which encompasses part of Kansas City.

Coleman won Tuesday's election with 3,496 votes, KSHB reported. More than 2,000 write-in votes were counted, but it's unclear what names were submitted.

In June, Coleman admitted to allegations that he bullied and threatened girls online when he was 14 years old, including calling one girl fat and saying she should kill herself, and circulating a nude image of another girl when she refused to send him more pictures, according to The New York Times.

In July, he was also widely criticized for making insensitive comments about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Kansas Reflector, Coleman mocked the death of former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain -- who died of the coronavirus -- and said he would "giggle" if former state GOP Rep. John Whitmer caught the virus and died. Coleman later apologized for his comments.

Despite the scandals, Coleman beat seven-term incumbent Stan Frownfelter, also a Democrat, in the August primary, albeit by a narrow 14 votes.

Coleman apologized for the bullying and revenge porn in a statement to The Kansas City Star after winning the primary.

"I made serious mistakes in middle school and I deeply regret and apologize for them. I've grown up a great deal since then," Coleman said.

But this wasn't good enough for the state Democratic Party, which refused to back Coleman as a candidate.

Coleman actually dropped out at one point after the primary, but continued with the campaign two days later, saying the fact that he won even with his background was a strong message from voters.

"They said that they did not vote for me expecting that I was a perfect person," he said in a statement on Twitter, according to The Hill. "They told me that all of us have sinned, and we all make mistakes."

"Voters do not throw out a 7-term incumbent for a person like myself unless they are deeply frustrated with their lack of representation and demanding a change."

The state Democratic party scrambled to present an alternative candidate, backing a write-in campaign for Frownfelter, KSHB reported.

On Wednesday, Coleman tweeted: "Thank you to all of my supporters. This campaign would not have been possible without you. I promise to work hard to serve the residents of this district."

Read the original article on Insider

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The USPS can't account for 300,000 absentee ballots, but that's probably not as bad as it sounds

 

Politics

The USPS can't account for 300,000 absentee ballots, but that's probably not as bad as it sounds

Peter Weber

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan was furious Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service had defied his order to sweep postal processing facilities in 15 states Tuesday to find missing absentee ballots and deliver them on time. The USPS had said in a court document that 300,000 ballots had been scanned into facilities but not scanned out, suggesting they were misplaced.

Instead of complying with Sullivan's order, the USPS kept to its own schedule, raising concerns that tens of thousands of ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted. "It just leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth for the clock to run out — game's over — and then to find out there was no compliance with a very important court order," Sullivan said. He suggested he would demand a deposition from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Notably, there were 81,000 untraced ballots spread across postal districts in key swing states with a combined 151 electoral votes, The Washington Post reports, though, according to its analysis, the missing ballots "are unlikely to affect the outcome of the presidential race." In many cases, USPS said, the ballots had been hand-sorted and delivered without an exit scan. The USPS did not provide data to indicate how prevalent that practice has been, though it did disclose that 7 percent of ballots in its sorting facilities Tuesday were not delivered in time to be counted.

"Even in a worst-case scenario where all potentially misplaced ballots in a state are permanently lost, those ballots amount to just a fraction of both current two-party vote margins and estimates of the number of outstanding ballots yet to be tallied," the Post reports. In Georgia, for instance, the maximum 6,624 missing votes represent just 8 percent of the margin between President Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

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In other states, though, the number of missing ballots is larger — more than 11,000 in Pennsylvania and 16,000 in Florida — and the untraced absentee votes in Arizona make up 24 percent of the outstanding margin between Biden and Trump, the Post reports. Also, its analysis that "misplaced mail ballots will not be a significant factor in final vote tallies" has the caveat that it might be a factor if "the final presidential vote margins shrink to low three- or four-digit numbers in the coming days." In some states, like Arizona and Georgia that's a distinct possibility.

 

 

 

USPS's handling of mail-in ballots was 'gross negligence': Fmr. USPS Board of Governors Chair

Former USPS Board of Governors Chair David Fineman joins Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers to discuss the postal service's handling of mail-in ballots. 


“The assumption that there are unaccounted ballots within the Postal Service network is inaccurate. These ballots were delivered in advance of the election deadlines. We employed extraordinary measures to deliver ballots directly to local boards of elections." - USPS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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U.S. Postal Service says 1,700 ballots found in Pennsylvania facilities

 

 

Politics

U.S. Postal Service says 1,700 ballots found in Pennsylvania facilities

David Shepardson
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By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said about 1,700 ballots had been identified in Pennsylvania at processing facilities during two sweeps Thursday and were being delivered to election officials.

In a court filing early Friday, USPS said 1,076 ballots, had been found at the USPS Philadelphia Processing and Distribution Center. About 300 were found at the Pittsburgh processing center, 266 at a Lehigh Valley facility and others found at other Pennsylvania processing centers.

Ballots must be received by Friday evening in Pennsylvania in order to be counted. The vote for the U.S. president remains extremely close and Pennsylvania is one of the states that remains undecided.

About 500 ballots were also discovered in North Carolina during sweeps, USPS said on Friday.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday had ordered twice daily sweeps at USPS facilities serving states with extended ballot receipt deadlines as votes were still being counted in U.S. election battleground states.

Some states, including Nevada and North Carolina, are counting ballots that are received after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday.

Lawyers said at a court hearing on Thursday that USPS had delivered about 150,000 ballots on Wednesday.

"The vast majority were destined for postmark states and would be delivered on-time under state election law," USPS said.

Sullivan said the processing centers must perform morning sweeps and then afternoon sweeps "to ensure that any identified local ballots can be delivered that day."

Sullivan issued a separate order requiring USPS to "coordinate with all local county Boards of Elections in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" in order to deliver all ballots "before 5:00 PM local time in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" on Friday.

Ballots were still being counted by election officials in battleground states after polls closed Tuesday in one of the most unusual elections in U.S. history because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden was cutting sharply into Republican President Donald Trump's leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The former vice president retained slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.


(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Robert Birsel)