WATCH: Bill Barr Complains About Legal Ballots Being Vetted Rather Than Tossed Out
Bill Barr, who served as Attorney General under Donald Trump, angered the former president by affirming that there was no widespread election fraud. Now that midterm elections are approaching, and Trump continues to hint that he may run again in 2024, Barr has made a u-turn, and is listing the things he believes made the 2020 election “rigged” — including the procedures for legal ballots delivered en masse.
“Ballot harvesting” is one of those loaded terms that can be easily twisted to evoke imagery of shady practices, piles of envelopes, and voter intimidation or coercion. However, it could refer in fact to anything from a single operative gathering hundreds of ballots to return, to a family member or neighbor returning a ballot for a homebound voter. Ballotpedia has the full list of states and their laws on who can return a ballot, but the short version is, the practice isn’t universally illegal, and certainly isn’t universally fraudulent.
In the clip below, Barr agrees with Larry Kudlow that the election was rigged, inexplicably blames Mark Zuckerberg, and then gets animated when he starts speaking of ballot harvesting — complaining that if the ballots are legal, they’re still counted.
Larry Kudlow claims the 2020 election was "rigged before the voting starting." Bill Barr agrees with him. Crazed stuff. pic.twitter.com/qwKhJGs7Vr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2022
“Then you have rules that are meant to preserve the integrity, such as no harvesting of ballots. Now, if people violate that, the violator can go to jail, but you don’t throw out the ballots and that’s one thing that people don’t understand. You still have to prove the ballot was invalid, that there was some fraudulent aspect to it.”
Barr seems to be suggesting that perfectly valid ballots should be thrown out, without any evidence of fraud.
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