Activists and lawyers supporting the Trump campaign have challenged the validity of around 4,000 ballots within the battleground state of Pennsylvania just hours before election day.
Election officials from 14 different counties across the state reported receiving challenges to ballots, with challengers questioning whether or not the people that cast those ballots met the residency requirements of the swing state, reported the New York Times. By last Friday, which also happened to be the deadline to challenge an absentee voter's eligibility to vote, they had received over 4,000 challenges.
The Pennsylvania Department of State released a statement indicating that the challenges, which it believes were "made in bad faith", aimed to "undermine confidence in the Nov. 5 election."
"These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected," the Department stated.
However, this perspective regarding ballot-challenging is not shared by activists supporting the former President, who have repeatedly enacted these same tactics in multiple different swing states. In Georgia, pro-Trump activists submitted challenges addressing the ballots of over 63,000 voters. While fewer than 1% of voters challenged were actually called into question and then removed, activists have continued to challenge votes in other crucial states such as Michigan, Nevada and Ohio.
In fact, they do not see these efforts as fruitless. One activist, Heather Honey, said the challenges submitted "could not be in better faith."
"Without a doubt the point of this is to lay the groundwork for challenging election results a person is unhappy with," said executive director of the organization All Voting Is Local, Hannah Fried. "There's no there there."
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