Sen. Richard Blumenthal: Trump’s Claims of Fraud ‘Beyond Dangerous and Damaging’

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (CT-D) said Friday in Hartford that President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the battleground states is “beyond dangerous and damaging.”

“They were pathetic and sad,” Blumenthal added, reported the Stamford Advocate, at a press conference to urge Democrat state lawmakers to pass an amendment to the Connecticut Constitution to allow early voting and vote by mail.

The senator continued:

But what struck me most was how insidious and insulting they were to those countless men and women who are making democracy work. And in fact, democracy is working. The votes are being counted despite every effort by the president and the right-wing fringe to subvert and stop that count.

“By the end of today, Joe Biden will be president-elect of the United States,” Blumenthal asserted.

He joined with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Secretary of State Denise Merrill to urge the Democrat-controlled state legislature to pass an amendment to the Constitution to allow vote by mail and early voting.

“He’s making up a set of facts out of thin air,” Murphy said of Trump. “It’s clearly going to be Joe Biden’s decision when he declares victory, but he is going to declare victory.”

However, state GOP chairman J.R. Romano defended the president’s challenges to any irregularities.

“It is what it is and we’ll see what happens, but I’ve said all along that this race would be close and wouldn’t be decided for 72 hours,” he told the Advocate. “There are so many questions out there and so many flaws that can be exploited.”

Romano criticized that voters in Connecticut are not asked to present proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

“That makes me agitated,” he said, noting the many years of voting irregularities in Bridgeport without audits of absentee ballots.

The Associated Press (AP) reported in January 2019 that a former chairman of Stamford’s Democratic Committee was arrested and charged with absentee ballot fraud and forgery.

John Mallozzi was accused of organizing the filing of about 29 fraudulent absentee ballot applications and 26 fraudulent ballots during the 2015 municipal elections.

AP reported:

Mallozzi’s attorney, Stephan Seeger, said that there was no criminal intent by his client and that the problem lies in what he called the irregular procedure of filling out, collecting and filing those ballots. Mallozzi will plead not guilty, he said.

As Breitbart News also reported in August, a Democrat operative told the New York Post about the extensive voter fraud operation he ran to fix elections at every level for Democrats.

According to the report:

In one story, the operative explained how he and his staff make fake mail-in ballots by simply running ballots sent to registered voters through a copy machine. The envelopes used for the ballots, though, are much more difficult to recreate, so instead his staff goes door-to-door convincing voters to let them deliver their mail-in ballots for them.

Afterward, the whistleblower said he and his staff use steam to open the envelopes, remove the mail-in ballots, and replace them with fraudulent ones before delivering them to mailboxes.

The operative added postal workers are sometimes part of the plan.

“You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold,” he said, adding that “he can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.”

Currently, Connecticut’s constitution does not allow early voting or mail-in voting. This year, during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) said in April that, due to his “stay-at-home rule,” he was “going to have to find a way people can vote – and especially seniors – so they don’t have to leave their houses and go vote.”

“So, obviously the voting by mail makes a lot of sense to me,” Lamont said. “Now, I need the lawyers to figure out how to draft that.

With the pandemic as background, Merrill sent every voter in the state, unsolicited, an application for an absentee ballot. The state Constitution, however, would need to be amended to allow mail-in and early voting for any reason at all.

“Connecticut is in the Neanderthal era,” Blumenthal said, just as mail-in ballots are a focus of intense controversy in the presidential election.

Merrill released a press statement Wednesday calling for an amendment to pass with a supermajority so that voters can decide in 2022:

As our local election officials are working hard to complete the counting of an historic number of absentee ballots, one result is absolutely clear – the voters of Connecticut want to be able to vote conveniently by absentee ballot without an excuse. Connecticut voters have spoken and they want options that make voting more convenient for them, just like voters across the country have.

Merrill said more than 650,000 voters “safely and conveniently” cast their ballots this year by mail, giving the election one of the highest turnouts in the history of the state.

The secretary of state also tweeted she was happy to have the support of Blumenthal and Murphy “in pressing for changes to the way Connecticut voters cast their ballots in the future.”

“We’ve got some work to do to lobby state legislators on the need for early voting & greater access to mail-in ballots,” she added.