You Are Wrong, Doug

Newspapers walk a fine line during Election Season. Sadly, Pennsylvania Election Season 2022 has been in effect since 2021.

One letter writer to the Allentown Morning Call claims that the paper is a tool of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. The next letter writer claims that it supports Fascism / Xenophobia / Misogyny. The Call balances its op-ed pieces between the Heritage Foundation and the NY Times which satisfies no one.

Even if it had the courage to do it, investigative reporting would be a massive problem for the Morning Call. Its skinflint owners left it with about one quarter of the reporters that it once had. The Call can’t even cover Groundhog Lodge meetings anymore.

It relies on Spotlight PA for investigative reporting. “Don’t blame us if you disagree with what they found.” Spotlight PA delved into fraud claims regarding Pennsylvania’s 2020 election in an article published yesterday. Current GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano came to prominence (and gained Donnie’s precious endorsement) with these claims about malfeasance in the Keystone State:

1. Voting machines are connected to the Internet. Hackers substituted Biden votes for Trump votes. Spotlight PA pointed out that voting machines are not connected to the Internet and that they include a verifiable paper record of votes cast. When Republicans in the PA Legislature paid their own contractor to re-check this “paper trail” (at a cost of $300 K), Biden won the state by more than originally reported.

2. It took three days after the election for all the votes in Philadelphia to be counted. Biden’s big win in Philly swung the election his way. Who knows what chicanery occurred in those three days? Spotlight PA found that since the Legislature forbade even opening mail-in ballot envelopes until the polls closed on Election Day, it was physically impossible for the twenty-seven workers assigned the task to open and count 350,000 ballots overnight. These ballots were also re-counted by the Republican contractor and found to be valid.

3. There were 250,000 mail-in ballots with names that could not be verified on voters’ rolls. Dead people are voting! Fortunately, election officials picked this up when the ballots were received before Election Day. In 97% of the cases, voters didn’t use their full name. “OMG this Ed Dufton in Easton submitted a ballot and we know that Edward A. Dufton died in Scranton in 2000! Sorry, that must be Edward B. Dufton in Easton.” The 3% that couldn’t be easily verified were not counted.

4. Ballot drop boxes were placed in Centre County before ballots could legally be cast. Eighteen anxious voters jimmied the locked slot door and inserted their ballots anyway. When election workers came to unlock the drop box, they became suspicious about the damage and found those ballots. If that could happen in bucolic Centre County, God only knows how many fake ballots were stuffed into drop boxes in Philly or Pittsburgh! Spotlight PA found that those eighteen ballots were not counted and that Philly and Pittsburgh did cross-check drop box ballots against voter rolls. That’s another reason why it took so long to report final election results.

You are wrong, Doug. Newspapers may be afraid to call out your lies under their own by-line, but you are still wrong.

By Ed Dufton