OPINION — Last week, President Trump attempted to use the mistaken discarding of nine military ballots two weeks ago by a just-hired contractor at Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Election Bureau as part of his months-long campaign claiming mail-in ballot fraud will rig the upcoming election.
The Trump-Pence campaign on Friday used the same incident to claim, “Democrats are trying to steal the election,” despite the fact that the local Luzerne County government is controlled by Republicans and the county voted for Trump in 2016 by 20 percent.
A close look at what happened shows something else: How Trump, with access to administration information, can create false narratives that he believes will aid his re-election.
On September 14, 2020, a temporary worker was hired by the Luzerne County Election Bureau to help with the increased incoming mail balloting. His job was to sort the increasing amount of incoming mail because on August 25, the county had sent out ballots to military voters and Americans living overseas.
Apparently, military and overseas ballots for the general election do not have to be returned in a specific envelope, but mail ballots from Pennsylvania residents within the U.S. do have to be returned in a separate, specific envelope. Opening ballots during Pennsylvania’s June 2, 2020, primary became a problem because mail-in ballot requests and military ballots had very similar envelopes.
On September 16, 2020, after the temporary contractor’s second day on the job, Elections Bureau Director Shelby Watchilla discovered that the contract worker “incorrectly discarded into the office trash” nine military ballots and she “immediately began an internal inquiry and informed her direct supervisor,” according to a statement issued last Friday by Luzerne County Manager C. David Pedri. After the discovery, the temporary worker “was removed from service and informed not to return,” Petri said.
On September 17, in the late afternoon, Pedri’s office contacted the Luzerne County District Attorney’s Office for investigation and assistance about what Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis later described in a news release as “a small number of mail-in ballots.”
Meanwhile, all the Election Bureau office garbage from September 14 to 16 was place in a dumpster and secured. At that time, “the Luzerne County Elections staff were unaware for whom the ballots were cast,” according to Pedri’s statement.
Luzerne County District Attorney Salavantis on Friday, September 18, requested the assistance of U.S. Attorney David J. Freed, and on Monday, September 21, FBI agents immediately began an investigation.
During the next three days, the FBI discovered that seven of the ballots were all cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump and two military ballots that had been discarded but were previously recovered by elections staff, were reinserted into what appeared to be their appropriate envelopes, and then resealed. Normally during such an investigation, details such as the candidate being voted for would not be released publicly.
That information was in a release made public by Freed last Thursday afternoon.
However, sometime between Monday and Thursday, word of the FBI’s Pennsylvania ballot investigation reached local Pennsylvania media, who questioned Freed’s office.
Freed, in turn, sought guidance from Main Justice in Washington and apparently the inquiry involving Trump ballots reached Attorney General William Barr.
By early Thursday morning, Barr had passed the information to President Trump, although normally the details of an ongoing FBI investigation are not disclosed to the White House.
We know Trump was informed because that morning, the President went on Fox Radio News, and told host Brian Kilmeade he had a new story to illustrate his continuing complaints about the lack of security of mailed-in ballots.
“These ballots are a horror show,” Trump stated. “They found six ballots in an office yesterday in a garbage can. They were Trump ballots — eight ballots in an office yesterday in — but in a certain state and they were — they had Trump written on it, and they were thrown in a garbage can. This is what's going to happen. This is what's going to happen, and we're investigating that. It's a terrible thing that's going on with these ballots… When they get there, who's going to take care of them? So, when we find eight ballots, that's emblematic of thousands of locations perhaps.”
Trump’s slightly confused and expanded version was followed by an equally distorted statement from White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who said, "I can confirm for you that Trump ballots, ballots for the President were found in Pennsylvania. And I believe you should be getting more information on that shortly… Here, in the last 24 hours, they were found cast aside."
The Trump and McEnany announcements generated press inquiries at the Justice Department, the FBI and in Luzerne County, leading to the eventual release Thursday afternoon from U.S. Attorney Freed.
Freed confirmed that Trump ballots were involved, but also pointed out that no fraud or criminal activity has apparently been found.
He said, “Our investigation has revealed that all or nearly all envelopes received in the elections office were opened as a matter of course. It was explained to investigators the envelopes used for official overseas, military, absentee and mail-in ballot requests are so similar, that the staff believed that adhering to the protocol of preserving envelopes unopened would cause them to miss such ballot requests. Our interviews further revealed that this issue was a problem in the primary election —therefore a known issue — and that the problem has not been corrected.”
Freed’s full explanation did not stop Trump’s election campaign team from using another distorted version of the story. Thursday afternoon, Matt Wolking, deputy communications director for the Trump campaign tweeted to his 102,000 followers: "BREAKING: FBI finds military mail-in ballots discarded in Pennsylvania. 100% of them were cast for President Trump. Democrats are trying to steal the election."
At 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon, Trump again condemned the Pennsylvania discovery as he departed the White House for a trip to North Carolina and Florida. “They found, I understand, eight ballots in a wastepaper basket in some location,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn. The ballots “had the Trump name on it, and they were thrown into a wastepaper basket... We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” he said.
During a campaign rally Friday night in Newport News, Virginia, Trump brought it up again. He told the crowd, “They had eight ballots in a wastepaper basket, military ballots, that all were for Trump. Every one was for Trump and they were in a wastepaper basket. They were thrown away and somebody saw them.”
This past Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows re-raised the event while appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation. Asked about FBI Director Chris Wray’s statement to Congress Thursday that “we [the Bureau] have not seen historically any voter fraud effort in a major election by mail or otherwise,” Meadows raised “an investigation that the Department of Justice just initiated… with some ballots being thrown at a wastebasket… nine ballots, but that’s what we found and we need to make sure we investigate it. But it’s not just the nine ballots in Pennsylvania. It’s duplicate ballots in other states.”
Meanwhile, back in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Salavantis has said publicly, “We are confident that it [the current inquiry] will be successfully resolved so it will not have an impact on the integrity of the election process.”
Pennsylvania State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, summed up his view of the situation during an interview last Friday on CNN.
“We have a president of the United States putting out these bogus conspiracy theories to stoke people up, to make them feel like somehow their vote, their participation in our democracy, is meaningless, to try and take away their power in this process,” Shapiro said, adding, “Now we have the facts, and the facts don’t meet the president’s rhetoric.”
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