Pennsylvania is a hotly contested swing state in nearly every election. Democrats won it for several elections until Donald Trump carried the state in 2016, although Joe Biden recaptured the Keystone State for the Democrats in 2020.
Pennsylvania is once again a major swing state in 2024, and both candidates and their surrogates have been visiting regularly. And just as he did in 2020, Trump is once again making baseless claims about voter fraud and “cheating” in the state.
According to a Trump post on Truth Social Wednesday, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO THE AUTHORITIES.”
On X user speculated that Trump is making the cheating claims because the campaign’s internals aren’t looking good in Pennsylvania.
tell me your PA internals without telling me your PA internals pic.twitter.com/dOCiWsLTlU
— Patrick Dillon (@mpdillon) October 30, 2024
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What is Trump talking about? According to NBC 10 Philadelphia, the campaign is suing Bucks County, in suburban Philadelphia, “over claims of voter intimidation and long lines as voters gathered to get mail-in ballots on the last day they were able to request them on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024.” No one was prevented from voting; those who missed the deadline to receive a mail-in ballot by the deadline are still able to vote.
Another report stated that Pennsylvania officials are “investigating as many as 2,500 fraudulent voter registration applications in Republican-leading Lancaster County that election workers flagged during routine reviews of the forms.” That those were flagged prior to the election is an indication that fraud was prevented, as opposed to being allowed to take place.
“We understand from the county that there was an outside organization collecting registrations and submitted them right before the voter registration deadline,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth, told NBC News.
Pennsylvania’s top elections official, Al Schmidt, responds to JD Vance suggesting potential legal action if non-citizens vote: “The good thing about our judicial system, which is really where our disputes should be settled, is it is always something of a ‘put up or shut up’… pic.twitter.com/bColxDNKlC
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 27, 2024
Pennsylvania was the site of numerous claims about large-scale voter fraud in 2020, as articulated by Rudy Giuliani at the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. But none of them checked out, and they were repeatedly rejected by the courts.
“Time and time again, in many dozens of cases in 2020, every one of those cases upheld that our elections were accurate and that we’re not susceptible to any sort of widespread voter fraud or anything like that,” Schmidt said in a separate interview on CBS News this weekend.
Photo courtesy of Political Tribune media library.
