In the GOP primary contest for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, contested by Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz of television fame), David McCormick, a businessman who is another Trumpian devotee, and Kathy Barnette, who claims to be a Trumpian while discarding the actual former President, the first two candidates are locked in quite a battle at the ballot box, while Barnette did not do as well as expected. In fact, the contest remains undecided.
And Trump is trying to game the system:
Ex-President Donald Trump is injecting his democracy-damaging fraud claims into a new election cycle, urging his friend Mehmet Oz to simply declare he won a too-close-to-call race for the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania — a key state in Trump’s desperate bid to steal the 2020 election.
The cliffhanger contest between Oz and David McCormick, another claimant to Trump’s legacy, is the marquee race from Tuesday’s round of primaries — and carries calamitous echoes of 2020 election controversy and ill omens for 2024. [CNN/Politics]
Oz has not, to my knowledge, taken that advice, but a number of pundits are outraged. What struck me, however, is how this is really an attempt to take part of our electoral system away from the folks who are tasked with, and measured by, their partisan-less vote counting, and move that part of our system into, at best, a partisan operation, and, at worse, into the camp of a party involved in the contest.
Trump attempts to camouflage this by claiming the process is already rigged, as we all know. Here’s Trump on this race:
He’s at it again. pic.twitter.com/F7AGlfjAbC
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) May 19, 2022
The usual sloppy thinking. France is a magnitude smaller than the US in terms of voting population. Less obvious is the spirit of volunteering in the two countries, which would certainly affect the number of volunteers available; interference and security concerns; monitoring concerns; requirements for overseas voting by military personnel and how they handle it.
And here Trump wants to discard the votes of Republicans that don’t meet his criteria, i.e., didn’t vote for Oz.
In the end, he wants his people to count the votes, to move vote counting under his control. Sorry, dude, it just doesn’t work that way.
And that’s the most important part of this race.
