The Trump re-election campaign asked a federal judge on Wednesday to prevent the state from counting this year’s mail-in ballots beginning 10 days before the election.
In a court filing earlier Wednesday, the campaign asked U.S. District Court Judge Michael Shipp to bar elections officials from accepting mail-in ballots until an earlier lawsuit brought by the campaign is settled.
“The public interest obviously weighs in favor of enjoining the government from violating federal law,” lawyers representing the president’s campaign said in their filing.
“Confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”
Wednesday’s filing follows a lawsuit from the campaign last month which challenged Governor Phil Murphy’s Executive Order allowing the state to send ballots in the mail to all of the state’s 6.2 million registered voters, alleging abuse.
“In the state of New Jersey, where their universal vote-by-mail system has already resulted in fraud and disenfranchisement, Governor Murphy continues to remove safeguards against abuse,” Trump campaign counsel Matt Morgan said.
“With a stroke of his pen, the governor told his people their votes may not count – they may even be stolen – and that’s fine by him.”
President Trump frequently rails against mail-in ballots, alleging that it will lead to widespread fraud and frequently cites a case in Paterson from earlier this year.
On Monday, the Sussex County Board of elections said they discovered 1,666 ballots from the July 7 primary which were not counted. The Board said they were mistakenly put in the wrong bin but did not affect the election results.
The private financial services sector has relatively secure online banking, a bank on every corner, and secure drive-through banking. Maybe banks should be paid to run the elections instead of the statist monopolies, including the post office…