WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz is warning about the potential for election fraud in Pennsylvania before officials have even started counting ballots.
“The way they do elections in Pennsylvania unfortunately is deeply messed up,” the Texas Republican said during the latest edition of his podcast.
As Cruz talked about his plan for watching election night results roll in, he noted that Pennsylvania’s Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman said they don’t expect to have all ballots counted on election night.
He called that “utterly bizarre” and said most places in the country count the votes on Election Day. When it takes “Democrat strongholds” days to count the votes, that opens the door to cheating, he said.
“It’s not complicated that if you’re counting three, four days after the election and you know the outcomes everywhere else and you know how many votes you need, it is an invitation to cheating, an invitation to misconduct. But that’s what Democrats do,” Cruz said.
Chapman and election officials across the country have sought to proactively counter misinformation and conspiracy theories ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections by telling the public vote counting can take time and delays are not an indication of nefarious activity.
Officials in Pennsylvania also must contend with a state law prohibiting the opening of mail-in ballots until Election Day.
Crossing the fact checkers
Monday was not the first time Cruz has questioned the time it takes some urban areas to count votes.
“Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes?” Cruz tweeted on Oct. 27. “The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”
PolitiFact described that as a misleading claim for several reasons.
Cruz has a point, according to PolitiFact, that some large urban counties saw counting delays during the 2020 presidential election.
But it pushed back on suggestions the delays are the result of partisanship rather than basic math — those areas obviously have more votes to count than counties with much smaller populations.
PolitiFact also said it found a number of less-populated Republican counties in Texas that lagged when it came to counting ballots on election night.
Cruz responded to Politifact with a string of Tweets highlighting portions of the piece acknowledging where he was right. He described the authors as “dishonest left-wing editorial writers.”
In his tweets, Cruz did not directly address other points in the piece such as Republican counties that have been slow to get their votes tallied.
Challenged to provide evidence of voter fraud, Republicans at times point to a database of such cases assembled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Heritage says the database is not intended to be comprehensive but rather to illustrate that real, verified cases of voter fraud do exist.
Still, critics say the database undermines the idea that election fraud is a widespread, outcome-altering problem given the cases included represent a miniscule fraction of the billions of votes cast in the United States over the years.
Sowing doubt
Cruz isn’t the only Republican who has been airing advance concerns about the legitimacy of Tuesday night’s results.
Former President Donald Trump recently posted on social media after Pennsylvania state lawmakers suggested counties had mailed out hundreds of thousands of unverified ballots.
Chapman responded by describing those concerns as inaccurate and a misunderstanding of the law and the data.
But Trump cited the situation as evidence of fraud.
“Here we go again!” Trump wrote. “Rigged Election!”
Republican candidates in other high-profile races, including the Senate contests in Wisconsin and Arizona, also have expressed advance skepticism about the legitimacy of results in their states.
Voters might be hit with deja vu listening to such statements.
Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Trump and allies laid the foundation for the idea that the use of mail-in ballots and any delays in counting them were de facto evidence of voter fraud.
That came despite widespread expectation that tallying mountains of mail-in ballots during a pandemic was likely to encounter some difficulties.
While inflation and other economic issues are dominating the minds of many voters, President Joe Biden has devoted part of his closing midterm argument to calling out “election deniers” who continue to question the legitimacy of his 2020 victory over Trump.
Biden on Sunday cited the many attempts to challenge his victory that were shot down in court, many of those by Republican-appointed judges.
“With these election deniers, there are only two outcomes for any election: either they win or they were cheated,” Biden said.
