Democracy Has Prevailed.

October 19, 2020

Wendy Bell Misleads Her Audience. Again.

This morning, Wendy Bell posted this on her Facebook page:

With America's general election just two weeks from tomorrow, Pennsylvania has taken center stage as a battleground over election security.

Army war hero Sean Parnell - the Republican candidate in PA Congressional District 17 - and Pennsylvania Air National Guardsman Luke Negron For Congress in District 18 - have filed a lawsuit requesting poll watchers be allowed at satellite voting offices in Pittsburgh's Allegheny County.

The lawsuit comes after nearly 29,000 voters in the county received incorrect ballots and 372,000 Pennsylvania mail-in ballot applications were rejected because of errors.

Do you have confidence that your vote - should you choose to NOT cast it in person - will get where it's supposed to, on time, to be counted?

Look at the examples she uses to undermine your faith in the mail in balloting system; 29,000 voters receiving incorrect ballots and 372,000 rejected mail in ballot applications. Once you see what Wendy's omitted, you'll see how she's misleading you.

We'll start here:

The Allegheny County Elections Division announced Wednesday that the company in charge of printing and mailing ballots sent the wrong ballots to 28,879 voters, citing an error by the vendor in charge of printing and mailing the ballots. 

“With a little under three weeks to go, it’s imperative that we ensure that our elections system is one that voters can trust,” said Allegheny County Elections manager Dave Voye on Wednesday. “This was a failure on behalf of our contractor and impacts too many of our voters.”

The elections division heard from approximately 20 voters last Friday that they received ballots for the wrong municipality, ward and district. Over the weekend, the county contacted Midwest Direct — the company contracted to print and mail ballots for the county — and mailing was suspended. It was determined that there was an image mapping issue, which resulted in a voter’s information (the municipality, ward and precinct) being matched to the ballot of the next voter in the printing batch.

The contractor, Midwest Direct, made the error, Wendy, not the Postal Service (the people whose job it is to "get where [the ballot's] supposed to, on time, to be counted" as you ungrammatically wrote).

And who is this "Midwest Direct" you ask?

Take a look:

Midwest Direct is owned by two brothers, Richard Gebbie, the chief executive, and James Gebbie, the chairman. This summer they began flying a Trump 2020 flag above Midwest Direct’s headquarters on the west side of Cleveland. It was a curious juxtaposition — a company in the business of distributing absentee ballots through the mail showing a preference for a president who has spent months denigrating the practice of voting by mail.

So a pro-Trump company screws up some mail-in ballots and Wendy Bell's all set to blame the US Postal Service.

Huh.

Then there's the other bit of evidence. Take a look at this:

Penn. rejects 372K requests for mail-in ballots

Pennsylvania, one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds in the presidential election, has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots, straining election offices and bewildering voters.

More than 90% of those applications, or about 336,000, were denied as duplicates, primarily because people who had requested mail-in ballots for the state's June 2 primary did not realize that they had checked a box to be sent ballots for the general election, too.[Emphasis added.]

Wendy, did you see that more than 90% were denied as duplicates? And did you see the reason why they were duplicates? So all those "denied" voters actually did get mail-in ballots, didn't they? It was just the duplicates that were rejected, right?

In any event, how would it impact how the Postal Service delivers the ballots?

One last question: Members of the military have been voting by mail for generations (and, assuming he voted while serving, this includes Sean Parnell), how was all that mail delivered?

Wendy, maybe you should ask Sean if he thought his mail-in ballots were secure.

Wendy, you're lying to your audience.

Again.