JD Vance Decides Best Way to Get Out the Vote Is With a Threat
JD Vance has decided to join Donald Trump in the voter intimidation game.
The leaders of the MAGA movement are apparently on a mission to sow as much election misinformation as possible.
Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance followed in Donald Trump’s footsteps on Thursday, elevating voting conspiracies to his more than two million followers on X (formerly Twitter).
“If you are in line, stay in line! If someone tells you to get out of line or to go home, take a video of them!” wrote Vance. “If you commit voter fraud, or try to deprive people of their right to vote, we will prosecute you!”
The Ohio senator was responding to another post made by Trump campaign director James Blair, who claimed that Democrats were illegally shutting down a polling station in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, based on a video in which an unidentified woman wearing a “voter protection” badge from PADems instructed a voter to speak with a nearby police officer about the station’s changed availability for obtaining a mail-in ballot.
“The reason why it had to close is because a high volume of people want to do this, it’s slow and grueling ... they had to cut the line at 1:45,” the officer can be heard saying in the video.
Earlier that day, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, officials responded to criticism over the long lines for mail-in ballots, writing in a post on X that all voters who had joined the line before 5 p.m. would be able to receive a mail-in ballot.
The delays are, in part, thanks to a law passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2019, which allowed most Pennsylvanians to vote by mail so long as they filled out an application at their county elections office.
But that process can take about 10 to 12 minutes per person, Bucks County Board of Elections Chairman Bob Harvie told CBS News.
“It is a very cumbersome process. We don’t have limitless resources here. We have a fixed number of staff. We have a fixed budget,” Harvie said.
But the filmed volunteer, who was hounded by the Trump campaign’s far-right allies, did nothing wrong according to Pennsylvania law, which permits poll watchers to stand outside of registered polling places. Volunteers can also monitor from inside the facility so long as they obtain a certificate from their local county board of elections and don’t overlap with other poll watchers monitoring on behalf of the same candidate.
The Trump-Vance campaign has kept a sharp eye on Bucks County this week. On Wednesday, the ticket announced that it had filed a lawsuit over alleged voter suppression in Pennsylvania, claiming without evidence that Bucks County was preventing Trump voters from participating in the 2024 election.
Speaking at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the night before, Republican National Committee co-Chair Michael Whatley claimed that the Keystone State had been “turning away our voters.”
The campaign did not point to any instance in particular that led it to believe that voters had been treated unfairly in Bucks County, but county officials had observed that there were complaints on social media (shared by the Trump campaign) about long lines to obtain mail-in ballots on Tuesday, the last day of their availability.
But Trump chose to stoke the flames Wednesday morning, posting on Truth Social that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.”