Dem
49
Ties
1
GOP
50
There was a time, way back in the distant past, when political parties spent the election cycle presenting their political program to voters, with the idea that the party with the best program would win the election and would then have a basis for the next 2 years of governance.
The modern Republican Party has effectively abandoned this quaint model. Their primary message these days is "vote for us because we are not the evil Democrats, with their critical race theory, socialism, open borders, hatred of cops, etc." That message is not quite enough to get it done, and so icing on this rather rotten cake is anti-democratic crap designed to undermine the voting process. And yes, we are editorializing here, but we've never made a secret that the #1 concern of this site is that every vote should be counted. Any person or party who stands in opposition to that proposal is going to be a target of our ire.
This cycle, a big part of the Republican plan is lawsuits. They have already filed a bunch of them, including several yesterday, meant to disqualify many thousands of ballots. The stated justification, of course, is to "prevent voter fraud." But every reader of this site knows that is nonsense, that voter fraud is almost nonexistent, and that the real purpose is to deny the franchise to groups of people who skew Democratic.
The situation in Pennsylvania is illustrative. As readers will recall, there is a fight going on there over undated ballots. For reasons that are unclear (but might be designed to suppress votes), the Pennsylvania legislature requires someone to sign and correctly date an absentee ballot for it to be valid. Nobody objects to the signature requirement, but the date requirement is dumb. If a ballot arrives in time, then it clearly must have been cast before the deadline, dated or not, unless the voter happens to have a DeLorean and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity laying around.
State election officials, backed by the state courts, decided that they would count undated ballots. But then the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and said "no." In response, some state election officials began taking steps to allow voters to "cure" undated ballots. Republicans quickly realized that the curing was much more common in blue municipalities and counties, and sued to stop it. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yesterday that curing was permissible, which will lead the Republicans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court today. Meanwhile, Democratic groups, with the campaign of Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D-PA) taking the lead, have filed suit arguing that SCOTUS erred, and that all ballots should be counted.
In short, we have all sorts of lawsuits flying back and forth in the Keystone State, meaning that if the Senate election is as close as expected, it may not be resolved for weeks or more until the lawsuits get straightened out. Meanwhile, folks in Philadelphia and other cities waited in line for up to 2 hours yesterday to fix ballots they had already cast. These folks are very cranky, and they blame the Republican Party for their headaches, with good reason. Pissing off voters in a swing state is not usually a winning strategy, in our experience. Obviously, someone who is just curing a ballot isn't likely to change their vote due to their irritation (although they could if they destroy the absentee ballot and vote in person). However, such folks have friends and family, not to mention potentially long memories that could last to 2024.
In total across the whole country, the Republican Party has already filed at least 120 lawsuits. And bushels more are certainly coming. Harmeet Dhillon is a member of the of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and she appeared on the show of popular Fox entertainer Tucker Carlson yesterday. During that appearance, Dhillon bragged that the RNC has already sent 38 veteran lawyers to 19 states, with more on the way. "So every battleground state is saturated with lawyers," she crowed. "I'm here in Arizona and you can't swing a cat without hitting a lawyer."
Of course, there were also a lot of Republican lawsuits after the 2020 election. And those largely did not go anywhere, in part because they were built on a foundation of legal gobbledygook, and in part because they simply did not appear to the public to be legitimate. The RNC is going to try to improve on the former part of that, if they can, and they are definitely going to try to improve on the latter.
This would be conspiratorial, nearly at tinfoil-hat level, if Republican operatives weren't openly admitting to the plan. What the GOP is doing is encouraging its voters to hold off on casting ballots until Election Day, ideally until as late as is possible. The general idea is to delay the election results until as late as is possible, perhaps even until Wednesday or Thursday. This will then be used as prima facie evidence that something is rotten and the election results are phony.
That's a pretty sleazy plan. It's also quite risky; if Republican voters hold off until the last minute, some of them ultimately won't make it at all due to being tired at the end of the day, or having a flat tire, or going to the wrong polling place, or having to feed the kiddies, or whatever. When so many races are neck-and-neck, this would seem to be an unacceptable risk. But the Republican Party has clearly decided this is the best (and only?) way for them to win. More on this below. (Z)