President Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea that mail-in voting encourages voter fraud, and his campaign has filed lawsuits against Pennsylvania and other states because of their plans to encourage voters to use mail-in ballots in November’s election. Journalist Richard Salame, in The Intercept, reports that in response to the Pennsylvania lawsuit, Trump’s campaign was asked to show proof that voting by mail encourages voter fraud — and it was unable to.
Salame notes that Trump’s campaign is “suing Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar and each of the state’s county election boards to prevent election administrators from providing secure drop boxes for mail-in ballot returns.” Two of the groups that support voting by mail in Pennsylvania, Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future and the Sierra Club, asked the Trump campaign to demonstrate that there is a connection between mail-in voting and voter fraud — and Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan granted their motion, asking the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much.”
The Trump campaign produced a 524-page document in response to Ranjan’s request, and The Intercept obtained a copy. According to Salame, the document “contains a few scant examples of election fraud” — but none of them actually involve mail-in ballots. Continue reading.