(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) With Philadelphia already poised to join Phoenix as ground-zero for questionable activity during Tuesday’s midterm election, suspicious were piqued by the 11th-hour announcement that a lawsuit led by Republicans could further delay counting.
A three-person panel of Philadelphia City Commissioners voted 2-1 to reinstate “poll book reconciliation,” a process that helps to confirm that those submitting mail-in ballots did not also vote in person, the New York Times reported.
At face value, the practice seems not only reasonable but extremely prudent. But with Pennsylvania’s law already requiring that the counting of mail-in ballots not begin until Election Day, the decision will forestall that even more, ensuring that an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 paper ballots would not be counted at all until after election night.
“Ballots that we received after the latest updates to the poll books will not get counted tonight while we reconcile the in-person vote with those returned ballots to make sure there are no double votes of somebody voting by mail,” Commissioner Seth Bluestein told the Times.
Further compounding the questions was the fact that the election-integrity organization behind the lawsuit, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, is fronted by notorious deep-state RINOs William Barr and Karl Rove.
The two Bush Regime acolytes have, at best, a spotty record when it comes to actually representing conservative interests.
While serving as attorney general during the Trump administration, Barr nototiously refused to investigate vast troves of evidence concerning vote fraud in the 2020 election and undermined President Donald Trump on other issues, including the Hunter Biden laptop, which the FBI had held in its possession for more than a year.
After privately denouncing the vote-fraud concerns as “bulls**t” to Trump, Barr later went public with his dissent and ultimately resigned before the end of Trump’s presidential term.
Rove—considered the wunderkind behind George W. Bush’s 2000 victory, was an early Trump critic but appeared, like Barr, to fall in line during the Republican administration.
However, a super-PAC tied to Rove recently threw financial support to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democrat candidate who is running to be governor against state Sen. Doug Mastriano.
Stein was notoriously complicit in the Keystone State’s mail-in ballot fiasco during the 2020 election, while Mastriano pushed to form a special legislative panel to investigate it and was one of the most vocal skeptics in the election’s aftermath.
Among those skeptical of Rove’s and Barr’s intentions was Townhall’s Katie Pavlich, who pointed out that the effort appeared to be working in tandem with the messaging from Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, Leigh Chapman, along with the Biden administration.
Both have supported indefinite delays of the results.
KJP: "We may not know all the winners of elections for a few days. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner. That's how this is supposed to work, and it's important for us to all be patient…" pic.twitter.com/7u4YeaT4yO
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 7, 2022
It also follows a last-minute legal challenge from Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the GOP senatorial candidate, to reinstate improperly marked mail-in ballots that the state Supreme Court had said must be set aside and kept separate from the official count.
Chapman had demanded that counties nonetheless report the party affiliations of the voters whose ballots were invalidated.
Her office also was implicated in an apparent scheme to send some 250,000 ballots to unverified voters.
