Early voting has begun in most states1 and Election Day is just five days away. Patriotic bunting is going up at the library; people are putting tiny American flags in their planters; and criminals, con artists, and the Republican candidate for president are all getting into the spirit of the season by starting their campaign of election disruption and interference.
On his Truth Social account, Donald Trump posted that Pennsylvania—perhaps the most critical state this cycle—is witnessing cheating “at large scale levels rarely seen before.”
It’s easy to read this as a simple expression of panic: Perhaps Trump has been given some bad news by his team and is moving to sow division ahead of an anticipated loss in the state. But Trump doesn’t just claim fraud when he loses. In 2016, upset that he’d lost the popular vote, Trump claimed he had overcome widespread voter fraud to win the presidency. He even launched a commission by executive order to search out the alleged fraud. It disbanded without finding anything.
The Trump campaign, the RNC, and Senate candidate Dave McCormick filed a lawsuit against Bucks County, a Philadelphia suburb that often serves as a bellwether in presidential elections, following reports that some residents were turned away at early voting centers. County officials claimed this was simply a “miscommunication” and that voters were accommodated.
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