As Voting Ends, Battle Intensifies Over Which Ballots Will Count - The New York Times - 0 views
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President Trump and his allies say they intend an aggressive challenge to how the votes are counted in key states, and Democrats are mobilizing to meet it.
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With the election coming to a close, the Trump and Biden campaigns, voting rights organizations and conservative groups are raising money and dispatching armies of lawyers for what could become a state-by-state, county-by-county legal battle over which ballots will ultimately be counted.
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In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College.
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in a year that has seen record levels of early voting and a huge surge in use of voting by mail, Republicans are gearing up to challenge ballots with missing signatures or unclear postmarks.
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Mr. Trump in that moment said out loud what other Republicans have preferred to say quietly, which is that his best chance of holding onto power at this point may rest in a scorched-earth campaign to disqualify as many votes as possible for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
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After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.
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Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight,
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Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic Party, said Democrats were keeping careful track of all ballots that were being rejected in key swing states, under a strategy to get as many as possible fixed and reinstated now and seeking to force the reinstatement of the rest in postelection litigation if the closeness of the Electoral College count requires it.
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A wild card for both sides is the posture the Justice Department will take in voting disputes under Attorney General William P. Barr. On Monday, the department announced it was sending civil rights division personnel to monitor voting at precincts across the country, including in key areas like Philadelphia, Miami, Detroit and Houston. That is standard operating procedure, but both sides were girding for possible breaks from protocol given Mr. Barr’s own statements about potential for fraud, which have echoed Mr. Trump’s.
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The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.
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The president has no legal authority to stop the count on Tuesday night, and even in normal election years, states often take days or even weeks before completing their tallies and certifying the outcome.
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That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.