Admitting to breaking the law just before Donald Trump takes over the Department of Justice is a choice, and it was one made by two Pennsylvania election officials in Bucks County, PA. In a shocking video, Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia can heard proclaiming that she's going to purposefully ignore multiple court rulings to count illegal votes. At the center of this is a contentious Senate race in which Republican Dave McCormick defeated Democrat incumbent Sen. Bob Casey. Yet, Democrats in Pennsylvania continue to try to manufacture votes to flip the result.
If you want to know what rigging an election looks like, this is it.
DIGIROLAMO: We reject all three categories of these ballots.
RECORDER: Your motion is to reject or dismiss the challenges in this category?
DIGIROLAMO: Correct, yeah.
MARSEGLIA: Not going to second that mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn't matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it's because I want a court to pay attention to it.
The background here involves counting ballots that don't pass the signature tests (among other disqualifying situations) laid out by Pennsylvania law. Multiple courts, including the state's Supreme Court, have upheld those laws. Yet Marseglia along with fellow Democrat commissioner Bob Harvie voted to count them anyway, not out of ignorance, but while admitting they are breaking the law.
I'm aware that the courts will almost assuredly step in and stop this, but what if the courts didn't even know about it? What if Republicans didn't have the resources to file the necessary lawsuits? That's what's so concerning here. How many times does something like this happen and we don't find out about it because these county commissioners or whatever else they may be referred to as in other states never say so publicly?
In the end, will this change the outcome of the Pennsylvania Senate race? It appears that isn't likely. Even if a court didn't step in, there aren't enough ballots outstanding to change the outcome (at least, that's what I'm being told by McCormick's team).
With that said, I don't care. These two need to be made an example of. The Trump DOJ needs to prosecute Marseglia and Harvie to the fullest extent of the law. Both are on video knowingly violating the law and if they get away with it, imagine what they and others will do during the next election. The only way to fight back against this kind of subversion of our elections is to create deterrence. Election officials should be just as subject to jail time as any random voter who violates election laws.
As to the Republican response, the Pennslyvania GOP and RNC are all over this, and you can expect legal action to be taken very soon to prevent these illegal ballots from being counted. Again, though, what if they didn't know this had happened? What if all this had occurred behind closed doors? If elections in the United States are ever to be trusted by the majority of Americans, the hammer needs to drop here. Hard.
