Was the 2024 presidential election rigged somehow by some unsavory characters with a history of such actions from the last presidential election?
I don’t know. But I wouldn’t put it pass some Republicans who tried to steal the election away from Biden and Harris in 2020. They may have perfected some of their dastardly ways and avoided media coverage but possible further investigation by my former journalism buddies who – like me – may sense that something just doesn’t seem right about this election.
Particularly in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Georgia where MAGA supporters tried their best to keep Trump in power four years ago. Could they have sharpened their skills and avoided detection from the state government powers, with three out of three states above run primarily by Republicans, with Minnesota the only one controlled the Democrats?
William “Bill” Bachenberg, Bernadette Comfort, Ash Khare, Patricia Poprik, and Andrew Reilly were included on a list of electors submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of State by the GOP in 2020. They drew criticism and were nearly charge criminally after submitting their names as electors for Pennsylvania in December 2020 and casting votes for then-President Trump, even though Joe Biden won the state’s popular vote.
In addition, Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, introduced Trump to a top DOJ official who was open to election conspiracy theories. Attorney Cleta Mitchell helped Trump try to convince Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for him to win. And Mastriano pushed his fraud claims to the No. 2 Justice official while Trump was trying to convince then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to publicly say there was fraud in the election, according to the report.
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How could so many people in my home state of Pennsylvania refuse to vote for the vice president and instead chose for the twice-impeached felony convicted former president who was accused of rape and other despicable actions.
I don’t think anyone I know could have seen this coming. I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and most of my neighbors indicated their support for the vice president. But, unlike me, I haven’t heard anyone accuse the Republicans of what Trump accused Biden and the Democrats of coordinating.
Let’s wait and see and hope Trump gets a stiff prison sentence November 26 for the felony charges a jury of his peers found him guilty of . . .
And keep all the other charges against him open for trial.
Contoveros 
(Check out this article provided by Slate Magazine right before the election):
Thousands of Pennsylvania Ballots Will Be Tossed on a Technicality. Thank SCOTUS.
BY RICHARD L. HASEN
Last week, the Supreme Court allowed Virginia to conduct a last-minute voter purge to remove potential noncitizens from the rolls despite a federal law that seemed to bar the practice. And it refused for now to put on hold a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling allowing some state voters who mistakenly failed to include required secrecy sleeves over their absentee ballots to vote instead using a provisional ballot at a polling place.
But perhaps the most important thing that the court did in relation to the 2024 elections came two Supreme Court terms ago and was more indirect. Its actions could be costing thousands of voters their right to vote in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
On Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put on hold a lower court ruling that could have prevented the disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvania voters who cast timely mail-in ballots but with incorrect or incomplete dates. The Pennsylvania court may well have acted out of fear of violating the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Moore v. Harper and the “independent state legislature theory.” Moore may be deterring other state courts, too, from appropriately protecting voters more aggressively under their state constitutions.
Pennsylvania’s law disenfranchising voters who cast timely ballots but make an immaterial mistake is nonsensical. If a mailed ballot has arrived at election offices before Election Day, so we know it is timely, who cares if a voter has written in her birthdate rather than the correct date that she signed the ballot? The date requirement on a timely mailed ballot serves no purpose when state law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. Thousands of ballots are expected to be tossed in the upcoming election for this technical defect.
The Pennsylvania Legislature has failed to step in and change this terrible law, so voting rights lawyers have gone to court to challenge it. A federal challenge arguing that the law violates a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barring disenfranchising voters for certain immaterial errors so far has failed; the Supreme Court will decide after the election whether to take the case.
But the treatment of these timely ballots also has been challenged as violating the “free and equal” clause in Pennsylvania’s state constitution. Every state constitution provides some protections for state voting rights, and with federal courts reading U.S. constitutional protections in increasingly stingy ways, state courts and state constitutions provide a promising alternative path to protecting voters.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, has batted down every attempt to get it to take up this issue on the merits, both through appeals in cases coming from lower courts as well as an attempt to get that court to take up the matter directly. The most recent denial came on Friday, when the court put on hold a lower court ruling holding, yet again, that the matter violated the state constitution.
Why did the state Supreme Court reject all these attempts? The most recent rejection appears to be all about timing. Even if the “Purcell principle” is overused and selectively applied, changing the rules just days before the election is generally a bad idea. But the court also might have been worried that it would have gotten a quick U.S. Supreme Court smackdown under Moore v. Harper if it did so. And that fear of being slapped down might have been why the state Supreme Court also didn’t take up the issue earlier.
Moore v. Harper was a great and important case in one way and a troubling time bomb in another. In Moore, the court majority thankfully rejected a crazy argument, key to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 elections, that state legislatures have free-floating power in federal elections to do whatever they want in appointing electors, changing rules, unencumbered by state courts, state constitutions, governors, and other state actors.
But the court also did something much more troubling, as I explained in Slatewhen the case was decided in 2023:
In the last part of his majority opinion for the court, the chief justice got the liberal justices to sign on to a version of judicial review that is going to give the federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court itself, the last word in election disputes. The court held that “state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.” …
Make no mistake: This apparent new test would give great power to federal courts, especially to the U.S. Supreme Court, to second-guess state court rulings in the most sensitive of cases. It is going to potentially allow for a second bite at the apple in cases involving the outcome of presidential elections.
This is what was hanging over the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when it decided against protecting voters in its state who make an immaterial voting mistake. If it reads its constitution too aggressively to protect the rights of voters, it faces a Supreme Court that has given itself the power to strike such a ruling down and keep the state court in check. Moore is acting as a deterrent to protecting voting rights, especially through novel interpretations of state constitutions. Especially given that the federal courts are not protecting voting rights aggressively under the U.S. Constitution, this new hamstringing hurts.
Justice Samuel Alito signaled as much in a statement he issued in the other Pennsylvania case I flagged at the top of this piece, the one about secrecy sleeves on absentee ballots. Alito, writing for himself and other ultraconservative justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, agreed that procedural problems meant the court should not take up the issue at this time. But he flagged the Moore issue even though he had no obligation to explain himself in this emergency case. As Chris Geidner wrote for his indispensable Law Dork Substack, Alito was telling the world that “he, Thomas, and Gorsuch were open, in the context of Tuesday’s general election, to considering in a future case whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had gone too far.”
It’s too late for 2024 voters in Pennsylvania who write the wrong dates on their ballots, but turn those ballots in on time. They will be disenfranchised. But they are unlikely to be the last voting victims of Moore.
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All of this is so disappointing. I was asked if I was angry today and I just said, “I wish I were, but as heart-wrenching as it is, I’m not at all surprised.” Two women, overly-qualified for the position lost to Trump. Think about the only person who beat him? A man. A white man.
Sadly, even if there were any manipulation of votes by let’s say some techy tycoon (of course I’m talking about the owner of X) no one would believe it and it would just continue to sow doubt in our election process. Though, it would be a welcomed explanation because I’m sad about all the other explanations I’ve heard so far…
I pray for all of us. My heart is broken.
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Was it just misogyny? Any trace of racism on part of the current vice president? Maybe a combination of both and who knows what else.
I will try to remain positive in the next several months as some safeguards are suggested and possibly put into place to keep our democracy from falling prey to such a dictator as Trump.
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Thank you for this information, Micheal. It is all very worrisome (to understate).
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I am worried and will wait about a month to see if anything I mentioned bears fruit especially in the state of Pennsylvania. Othewrwise, I guess I will just to live with this . . .
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I always appreciate the steadiness of you.
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