A Trump-appointed federal judge demanded that the President’s campaign put up or shut up by Friday in regards to evidence that mail-in voting is rife with fraud.
“Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much,” ordered U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan in Pittsburgh.
Ranjan made the order in response to a request from two advocacy groups who intervened in the case, the Sierra Club and Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future, who said that the campaign “should not be permitted to raise such spectacular fraud-related claims, particularly in this national climate, and refuse to provide discoverable information to substantiate those claims.”
The Trump campaign and RNC filed a lawsuit at the end of June seeking to block Pennsylvania from using drop boxes for voters to submit their ballots. It claimed that letting voters drop their ballots off at any drop box was a violation of state law as well as the U.S. Constitution.
“Upending our entire election process and undermining ballot security through unmonitored by-mail voting is the single greatest threat to free and fair elections,” the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit seems to be the first time the RNC or Trump campaign have targeted drop boxes, which have been used by some states during the primaries particularly as a response to the COVID-19-related danger of voting in person. The campaign and RNC have frequently gone after other aspects of the vote-by-mail process.
Trump himself assails voting by mail almost daily, despite the fact that he submitted his own application for an absentee ballot this week.
On Thursday, he admitted that he is undermining the United States Postal Service specifically because of his opposition to mail-in voting.
“They want three and a half billion dollars for something that’ll turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money basically,” he said on the Fox Business Network. “They want three and a half billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
Read the judge’s order here:
