“We are going to do everything we are legally allowed to do to stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election”, the confirmation email reads.
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“The only way we can lose, in my opinion”, Trump told the crowd, “is if cheating goes on”.
“We are preparing a robust effort to be prepared to ensure all voters are able to cast a ballot”, said Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. “We’re going to watch Pennsylvania, go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times”, he said.
This post has been updated. Voting laws make it quite clear that such independent observers could easily be interpreted as an attempt to intimidate voters and influence the election outcome.
The Trump campaign went still further, calling on its website for supporters to volunteer to be Trump election observers.
Trump’s latest moves echoed – but went even further than – his statements last week in OH that he’s “afraid the election is going to be rigged“.
Trump made his rambling allegations in Pennsylvania, which at one point he had hopes of actually winning.
Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls in Pennsylvania is solid – a Quinnipiac survey of likely voters released Tuesday found Clinton leading Trump 52% to 42%. And your mother is voting for Trump!
Despite the evidence from current polls, Trump is essentially suggesting at rallies that the only way Clinton could win in Pennsylvania – and by extension elsewhere – is by rigging the election. Instances of proven voter fraud are rare and usually occur on too small of a scale to change the results of an election. He’s also stoked fears of cheating at the polls, arguing that fraud will increase this year because courts have rolled back voter ID laws in some states.
Pennsylvania’s own voter ID law was struck down in 2014 after a court found it would potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters and would have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities, the elderly and low-income voters.
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And unlike voter fraud, voter intimidation has been a problem historically. It’s what the RNC consent decree is trying to prevent, and it’s not restricted to the GOP either.
