Donald Trump is already contesting votes. When there is still a week left until election day on November 5. Indeed, Republicans have asked the United States Supreme Court on Monday for an emergency order in Pennsylvania that could result in thousands of votes not being counted in this year’s elections in the disputed state, reports the Associated Press.
With just over a week until the election, Trump is asking the court to intervene in a dispute over provisional ballots cast by Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots are rejected for not following the technical procedures of state law.
The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that election officials must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were voided because they arrived without required secrecy envelopes.
The electoral fight has reached the Supreme Court on the same day that Virginia requested the judges’ intervention in a dispute over the purging of voter records.
Four years ago, the high court ruled on pandemic-inspired changes to voting rules in several states, including Pennsylvania.
In their lawsuit to the Supreme Court, Republicans have asked for an order staying the state court’s ruling or otherwise requiring that the provisional votes be separated and not included in the official vote count while the fight unfolded. legal.
Republicans argue that the legislator had not provided for the possibility of voters voting again if they made mistakes on the ballots they sent by mail.
Secrecy envelopes keep ballots hidden while election workers open the sealed outer envelopes used to mail back completed packages. Voters must also sign and date the outer envelopes. Pennsylvania voters have so far requested 2 million mail-in ballots.
Fire in electoral mailboxes in the states of Oregon and Washington
The Police of the states of Oregon and Washington, in the northwest of the United States, are investigating this Monday the fire of several electoral mailboxes that burned with hundreds of early voting ballots inside just over a week before the elections, reports Eph.
The Portland Police Department, in Oregon, reported the opening of an investigation after discovering last night “an incendiary device inside a ballot box on the sidewalk in the Central City district.”
“Only three ballots were damaged and the Department of Elections will contact those three voters so they can receive replacement ballots,” Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said in a statement.
A similar event was reported a short time later in Vancouver, Washington state, where an early voting ballot box “was smoking and on fire,” the Metropolitan Police Department said.
Images shared on social networks show several agents trying to put out the flames while trying to rescue hundreds of ballots deposited inside the mailbox. Some of them appear completely burned, although at the moment the exact number of votes affected is unknown.
The authorities do not know if both incidents, which occurred a few hours apart, are related, and at the moment no arrests or those responsible for these events have been reported.
These incidents occur eight days before the November 5 elections, and are not an isolated event: on October 24, agents arrested two people accused of setting fire to a mailbox with early voting ballots in different suburbs in the area. metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona.
Maricopa County, the most populous in Arizona, is key to defining who wins in this state, where the vice president and Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and former president Donald Trump are practically tied.
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