Voter ID debate helps fuel Trump's 'rigged' election claims
And now, an update from the world of - The election is rigged! They're stealing your vote! Fraud, fraud, everywhere!
And now, an update from the world of - The election is rigged! They're stealing your vote! Fraud, fraud, everywhere!
The election is not rigged. Your vote has not been stolen. The conspiracy theorists who claim these many frauds still can't show us any proof.
This, despite claims from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who predicted during a rally in Altoona on Friday that the only way he can lose the vote in Pennsylvania "is if cheating goes on."
There's a problem with Trump's math. We'll come back to that.
For now, we can report that the conspiracy theorists have to at least tell the truth when making their case in court.
That's the lesson here for the American Civil Rights Union, a pro-Voter ID group from Virginia that went to federal court last month, accusing the Philadelphia City Commissioners of violating the National Voter Registration Act by not removing from the voting rolls the names of incarcerated felons.
That clearly crossed a line for U.S. District Judge C. Darnell Jones II, who responded a day later by asking the ACRU why it should not be slapped with sanctions for what he called "an incorrect recitation" of federal law.
The ACRU was back in court this month, backpedaling that its claims were "incomplete" but "not inaccurate or dishonest."
Jones, in an Aug. 5 order, let the ACRU off without sanctions, warning the group that it "should proceed with caution."
As Jones explained, the City Commissioners, who run Philadelphia's elections, are allowed to remove the names of incarcerated felons, but federal law does not require it.
This has been a settled issue in Pennsylvania for nearly 16 years, when the state Commonwealth Court ruled that formerly incarcerated felons could vote. Registered voters incarcerated before trial are allowed to vote by absentee ballot. Voters convicted of a felony lose the right to vote while incarcerated. That right is restored upon release.
The City Commissioners, in their latest court filing, ask the judge to make the whole ACRU thing go away. That may happen, because of the whole follow-the-law approach applied here.
But the sort of motivations that drive the ACRU - and Trump - are not going anywhere any time soon.
The group still pushes claims of prevalent in-person voter fraud and advocates for laws requiring voters to show photo identification at polling places.
Pennsylvania passed such a law in 2012, but it fell apart in a court challenge two years later. Along the way, the lawyers defending the law for the state acknowledged that they had no proof to offer of in-person voter fraud, despite that being the reason the law was passed.
Trump spent the primary season bragging about polls and how well he was doing. But the primary season is long over.
Trump has stumbled and stumbled and stumbled in recent weeks. His talk of soaring polls has been replaced by predictions of election rigging.
With a potential loss in the general election looming ever larger, Trump is trying to shift the narrative to explain that.
Trump, a fan of repeating lines his rally crowds respond well to, now regularly suggests people may "vote 10 times" unless Voter ID laws stop them.
Courts in recent weeks have struck down or dialed back Voter ID laws in Texas, North Dakota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Michigan.
At his Altoona rally Friday, Trump said ominously, "I know what's happening here, folks" while predicting that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton can't beat him in this state.
This state, where recent polling has him trailing Clinton by 9 or 10 percentage points. Math, it can be hard.
"The only way they can beat it, in my opinion, and I mean this 100 percent, is if in certain sections of the state, they cheat," Trump told the rally.
Trump was speaking 175 miles west of Philadelphia. But it felt very much as if those words were about this city. As if Philly can be his fall guy if his campaign goes south.
Maybe Trump isn't bragging about polls these days. But they seem to be also very much on his mind.
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@ByChrisBrennan