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‘Buckle up’: Fetterman sues to have ‘tens of thousands’ of misdated ballots counted in last-ditch move

November 8, 2022 | | Print Article

The longstanding tradition of Democrats doing precisely what they accuse Republicans of continued Monday as Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s Pennsylvania Senate campaign filed a federal lawsuit over mail-in ballots while warning the press to “buckle up for a long week.”

Having failed to address the problems that arose in the 2020 presidential election, and after previous challenges to the commonwealth’s mail-in ballot rules, the United States Supreme Court vacated a federal court decision allowing for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to order undated and improperly dated ballots to be set aside. Now, in what skeptics view as a desperate attempt to swing the election outcome, Fetterman’s campaign is setting the stage for denying the outcome of the midterm.

Greg Price shared the report from The Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote, “In case you missed it, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled last week that elections officials should not count misdated ballots. John Fetterman is down in the polls and…now suing to have thousands…more ballots counted than otherwise would be.”

The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania read in part, “The Date Instruction imposes unnecessary hurdles that eligible Pennsylvanians must clear to exercise their most fundamental right, resulting in otherwise valid votes being arbitrarily rejected without any reciprocal benefit to the Commonwealth.”

“The date on a mail ballot envelope thus has no bearing on a voter’s qualifications and serves no purpose other than to erect barriers to qualified voters exercising their fundamental constitutional right to vote,” the attorneys further argued. “This unnecessary impediment violates the Civil Rights Act and the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

With all of the momentum moving in favor of Republican challenger Dr. Mehmet Oz, the timing of the suit one day before the midterm was viewed as more than a little suspicious.

Adding to the orchestrated nature of Fetterman’s challenge, his campaign also released a memo to the press early Monday adding to the narrative that it could take over a week to have the results fully determined.

Julia Manchester from The Hill posted a screenshot of the release and noted Fetterman’s campaign said “in a memo to reporters to ‘buckle up for a long week,’ saying that the ballot counting process could take ‘several days’ before the results are made clear.”

“We expect that in-person votes will skew Republican, and that mail votes will skew heavily Democratic — similar to how they did in 2020,” one part of the memo read. “In 2022, more than 1.4 million mail ballots have been requested, with about 70% requested by registered Democrats and about 20% requested by registered Republicans.”

Meanwhile, the memo also pinned Republican concerns over Democratic candidates trying to work around the rules as “spewing false conspiracy theories” and said, “On Election Night and soon after, we expect Republicans who embrace the Big Lie could try to double down on spreading disinformation and bogus lawsuits in an effort to illegally stop ballots from being counted.”

Kevin Haggerty
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