The Associated Press is suddenly very concerned about vote fraud via ballot stuffing in drop boxes. Allegations of drop box vote fraud is not coming from the "usual suspects" -- what they would describe as "right-wing conspiracy theorists" -- but rather from two Democrat candidates running for mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
You can read the AP concern in the headline of their Saturday article by Christina A. Cassidy and Susan Haigh, "Drop boxes have become key to election conspiracy theories. Two Democrats just fueled those claims."
Videos have trickled out in the weeks since the September 12 primary in the Bridgeport mayor’s race between incumbent Joe Ganim and his challenger, John Gomes, the city’s former chief administrative officer. Gomes, who lost by 251 votes out of 8,173 cast, filed an election challenge a week later after a video appeared to show a Ganim supporter putting several envelopes into a drop box outside a city hall annex in the early morning.
Ganim, who has denied involvement, is pointing to another batch of videos posted online that appear to show Gomes’ supporters making multiple stops at other ballot drop boxes. Gomes said he has spoken with those shown in the videos and was told they were dropping off ballots for relatives.
This Democrat fight risks validating the "far right fringe"!
The accusations of drop box fraud are not coming from those pushing fringe election claims or from skeptical Republicans who have long favored eliminating or severely restricting use of the boxes. They are being made by Democrats -- two candidates vying for mayor in Connecticut’s largest city, in a heavily Democratic state that began allowing drop boxes to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republicans have seized on the spat, which is now headed to a legal showdown that could result in a new election, to say it validates their concerns that drop boxes are ripe for fraud.
...On the surface, the controversy is a local matter: Two candidates are accusing each other of fraud in a municipal election. But its ripple effects travel far beyond the city of 148,000 and could have implications for the elections next year across the country.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has been doubling down on his lies about his loss in the 2020 election as he faces criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s win. Despite mounds of evidence showing the election was fair and accurate, a solid majority of Republicans still believe it was not.
You don't have to believe Trump won easily in 2020 to be counted as thinking the election wasn't "fair and accurate." In July, CNN's pollsters asked "Do you think that Joe Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency, or not?" Many Republicans think all the Big Tech censorship and media bias by omission on the Biden family scandals reek of unfairness.
But it's always a "Republicans seized" problem..,since "Republicans pounced" became too much of a laughable cliché.
News of the Bridgeport videos has spread through right-wing social media platforms and on far-right media, connecting the controversy to the 2020 stolen election claims. Users have promoted the investigation as evidence for the persistent, false narratives about widespread fraud connected to ballot drop boxes.
The videos and the fact that the claims are being pushed by two Democratic candidates threaten to further inflame criticism from the right that drop boxes are vehicles for election mischief. It’s a perception that election officials have been fighting for three years.
“It risks making what is the exception the rule in some folks’ mind,” said David Levine, a former local election official in Idaho who is now a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy. “It’s well established that drop boxes themselves are very safe and secure.”
Notice how the AP focus isn't on the actual ballot stuffing allegations, but on how Republicans "seized" on this story to show that vote fraud exists. They repeated:
Drop boxes are considered by many election officials to be safe and secure and have been used to varying degrees by states across the political spectrum with few problems.
Yeah, drop boxes are absolutely safe and secure... except when they're not.
