GOP congressman upset that ballots don't require stamps

As Donald Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania continued to shrink on Thursday, he demanded election officials “STOP THE COUNT!”

The late-counted mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have largely added to Joe Biden’s lead in the state — a fact that has displeased Trump and local GOP lawmakers alike.

On Wednesday, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) claimed without evidence that local officials were committing election fraud to tip the election for Biden.

“Number one, you have the fact that you have the attorney general of Pennsylvania saying before the election, before the votes were even counted, yesterday he said that by the time all the votes are counted, Joe Biden will be our next president or Joe Biden will win Pennsylvania,” he told Newsmax TV.

The GOP lawmaker also claimed, falsely, that some mail-in ballots weren’t valid because they didn’t have stamps. In August, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced that the state would cover any missing postage on mail-in ballots in order to make it safer and easier for Pennsylvanians to vote from home in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the interview on Thursday, Reschenthaler claimed that by upholding Wolf’s order, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court “unilaterally rewrote our election law to allow ballots to get collected without postage marks, without signature verification, not even requiring a stamp.”

Still, he maintained faith in a Trump victory, and blamed the media for calling the election for Biden prematurely.

“The mainstream media was too fast to declare this race for Joe Biden,” Reschenthaler said. “Given the unrest we’ve had all summer, this is setting up civil unrest, violent protests, and looting, and the people that are to be blamed are the media who set up a false narrative that Joe Biden won this election.”

As of Thursday morning, the Electoral College stood at 253 for Biden and 214 for Trump. Candidates need 270 Electoral College votes to secure victory.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.