Joe Biden and the Democrat Party have assembled an army of election lawyers and volunteers to fight off any attempts at election “chicanery” this November, ahead of what is expected to be a close contest.
The former vice president, who last month floated the idea that Trump would try to “steal” the election, told donors during a video conference on Thursday his campaign was not taking any risks, especially as they expected a large portion of the contest to be conducted through vote-by-mail.
“We put together 600 lawyers and a group of people throughout the country who are going into every single state to try to figure out whether chicanery is likely to take place,” the presumptive Democratic nominee said. Adding that his campaign already had “over 10,000 people signed up to volunteer.”
The former vice president, in particular, said the mobilization was in response to Trump and Republicans using the COVID19 pandemic to push a “systematic program on vote suppression.”
“We’re continuing to fight any effort to exploit the pandemic for political purposes, support … officials working like hell to make voting safe and accessible for citizens … or call out local rules that don’t adequately ensure access to voting,” Biden said, admitting such efforts would be “very difficult,” in light of Trump’s powers as commander-in-chief.
“The fact is that this is a fella who is literally trying to take away the funding for the post office so they can’t deliver the ballots,” the former vice president added.
The admission that Biden and his party were already preparing for legal challenges to a widespread vote-by-mail election comes as the topic is increasingly dividing Democrats and Republicans. Democrats favor the practice, arguing that it would be a safer alternative to in-person voting, were coronavirus cases to surge once more. Republicans, on the other hand, claim widespread vote-by-mail could interfere with the integrity of the elections process.
Apart from voter fraud, there are also concerns among some Republicans that vote-by-mail could delay the reporting of results well after Election Day, creating political instability across much of the country.
Wisconsin recently indicated the possibility of this scenario when it took more than a month to count at least 30,000 outstanding mail-in ballots from the state’s April 3 Democrat presidential primary. Meanwhile, less than 100 of the more than 400,000 voters who showed up to the polls in Wisconsin for that primary were later confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus. Roughly, that equals an infection rate below two-hundredths of one percent.
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