▲ Florida Senator Marco Rubio (at microphone) yesterday attended a campaign event for Republican candidate Donald Trump in Pennsylvania.Photo Afp
Jim Cason and David Brooks
Correspondents
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, October 30, 2024, p. 21
Washington and New York. Voting in the presidential elections does not conclude until next Tuesday, but both campaigns are already accusing their opponents of joining forces to commit fraud and other ways of manipulating the results, while armies of lawyers are already preparing their cases to dispute the results. .
York County, Pennsylvania, received thousands of potentially fraudulent registration records and mail-in ballot applications from an outside pooldenounced yesterday the Republican candidate Donald Trump. What’s happening in Pennsylvania? The authorities have to do their job, immediately. Republicans have already registered 130 legal demands that, according to them, have the objective of greater transparency and preventing illegal voting, but that Democrats denounce as measures to suppress the vote.
Stephen Bannon, former political strategist for then-President Trump and who has one of the most listened to podcasts in the country, commented yesterday that the former president is better prepared this year than in 2020 to fight legal battles and dispute the results. On his first day out of prison, where he served a four-month sentence for refusing to appear before Congress in the investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of the last election, Bannon said he is recommending that on In the elections, the Republican declares victory even before the final result is announced.
“You should stand up and say, ‘Hey! I won. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that they don’t rob us,’” Bannon said in an interview with the New York Times upon leaving prison. Trump insists he won the 2020 election, despite overwhelming evidence that he was defeated. In the weeks after the last election, Republican lawyers filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the vote count in key states, all of which ended up being rejected by judges and several attorneys were punished for presenting unsubstantiated and misleading cases, including the former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Trump has refused to declare that he will accept the results of this election if he does not win. Furthermore, for months rich allies of the former president have financed efforts to try to limit the vote in several states by promoting measures that make it difficult for some to participate, especially from poor, urban and minority sectors where trends favor Democrats. He New York Times reported that in the last three years conservative organizations have successfully elected Republicans as secretaries of state – the officials in charge of overseeing elections – in four states. To date, courts have rejected conservative efforts to impose restrictions and other obstacles on voters on Election Day in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Georgia, but those efforts continue even after Election Day with attorneys arguing to exclude certain votes, especially from states where the margin of victory is very close.
The Democratic Party has established an Election Integrity Unit and is working with a team of lawyers to monitor ballot counting in key states. Harris’ team has already worked out different hypothetical legal scenarios and has prepared thousands of pages of lawsuits that could quickly be modified to face electoral disputes in court, CNN reported.
With one of the candidates incessantly repeating that the elections, if he does not win, are unreliable and manipulated with the participation of illegalincluding those he lost in 2020, the majority of Republicans continue to question those results, despite zero evidence of fraud, and that distrust has become widespread among those ranks this year. Furthermore, with the background of the attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021, and the climate of political violence fueled since then, they have had their consequences. Three-quarters of likely voters thought that American democracy is under threat in a survey of New York Times this week. 21 percent believe Trump is the threat, 7 percent say it is immigrants and 5 percent believe it is Democrats.
In that poll, 47 percent of likely voters report being very or somewhat concerned that Trump and his allies will try to subvert the results of the 2024 election through illegal means. In another poll conducted by the AP agency, 76 percent of voters express concern about the possibility of violence during or after the elections.
But that is already happening. Aside from two assassination attempts against Trump, on Monday two incendiary devices were placed in boxes used to cast votes for those who can vote early in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington state. The authorities are investigating and requesting that voters who cast their ballots in those boxes do so again to replace the burned ones.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning in September reporting that it had detected possible preparations to disrupt the counting of ballots or destroy polling stations, while federal government officials are informing Congress about the possibility of violent attacks on the day of the polls or against employees who are dedicated to counting the ballots.
There appear to be no guarantees that every vote counts or will be counted in this country.
