This article was originally published By Votea nonprofit news organization focused on local election administration and voting access.
By Carter WalkerVote
New details about the 2020 Luzerne County ballot-dumping case show how the Justice Department’s handling of the FBI investigation contributed to then-President’s success Donald Trump false narrative of a stolen election — despite department policies designed to prevent such situations.
AND report On Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, an internal watchdog, investigated how senior officials handled and publicly disclosed information obtained as part of the FBI investigation, including then-Attorney General William Barr the decision to share details of the investigation with Trump while it is ongoing.
Trump’s re-election campaign has seized on the investigation into the tossed ballots as evidence that mail-in voting was manipulated to deny Trump the election.
But as the inspector general pointed out, the FBI discovered the real reason was much more mundane: a “mentally disabled” seasonal worker had simply made a mistake.
The Justice Department has policies in place to prevent politicization of investigations, especially during an election year. The inspector general’s report highlights how violations of those policies can turn into false and exaggerated claims of election fraud.
“These types of minor administrative errors in election administration can be exploited by bad faith actors to undermine confidence in our election process,” Pennsylvania official said Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt in a statement Friday. “Election administration is tightly scrutinized, and any error — no matter how inadvertent, no matter how minor — will be exploited by those who seek to undermine confidence in the election results and our representative democracy.”
Seven votes cast for Trump went to the trash
The case dates back to September 16, 2020, when then-Luzerne County Elections Director Shelby Watchilla discovered that one of her fleeting election workers mistakenly threw nine military absentee ballots into the trash, according to Politico reports then.
Watchilla reported the incident to his superiors, and two days later, the Luzerne County district attorney notified the FBI that a county elections worker had thrown seven military absentee ballots — which had been removed from their envelopes, revealing votes for Trump — into the trash. Two still-sealed envelopes that the worker had “mishandled” were also turned over to the FBI, according to the report.
The FBI took over the investigation on September 21. The next day, the district attorney issued a press release about the incident and the FBI’s role in the investigation.
According to the inspector general’s report, then-Attorney General William Barr briefed Trump on the incident on Sept. 23 and told him the votes had been cast for him, which was not public at the time. Trump repeated that claim on Fox Radio the next morning
First statement from David freedwho oversaw the investigation as the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, incorrectly stated that all nine votes were cast for Trump; a corrected version said only seven votes were cast for Trump, while the votes from two unopened ballots were unknown.
The Trump campaign and its allies quickly began weaving the incident into a narrative of election fraud, which ultimately escalated into a pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Here are some examples:
- Matt WolkingTrump campaign official, tweeted on September 24 that “Democrats are trying to steal the election” and repeated Freed’s erroneous claim that all nine mishandled votes were cast for Trump.
- Trump mentioned the incident twice first presidential debate to support his claim that the election “will be a fraud like you’ve never seen before.”
- At one point during the rally, Trump exaggerated his claims, saying:(*9*)thousands of votes”and the votes cast for him were “thrown into the trash”.
- conservative activist Dan Carr he said Facebook called the incident “actual election interference,” USA Today reported.
- Campaign Deputy Eric Trumpthe president’s son, he referred to the Luzerne case the day after the election as an indicator of Democratic fraud, saying that “we’ve seen it from day one.”
The Justice Department knew more than it admitted
Even as Barr briefed Trump on the incident on September 23 and Freed prepared his statement, the Justice Department had key information about the incident but withheld it from the public, allowing misinformation about the case to go unchallenged.
The FBI interviewed the fleeting election worker on September 22 and determined that he had “memory issues” and was “100% disabled” due to a “car accident that occurred when he was 20 years old.”[ith] brain damage,” the inspector general’s report said. The FBI also noted in an internal email dated Sept. 23 that the employee “was unable to follow simple instructions” and was assigned “simple tasks.”
Part of the problem, the report said, was that the return envelopes for military ballots were being confused with those containing absentee ballot application forms, so Luzerne election workers were opening both, even though the ballot envelopes weren’t supposed to be opened until Election Day. The envelopes containing the ballots weren’t clearly marked, the Pennsylvania Department of State said. he said at that time. Training for employees was increased after the incident and in a statement this week, Schmidt stressed fresh training program for election directors launched last year.
Before issuing his statement on September 24, Freed told Barr he was “not certain” whether the investigation “will lead to criminal charges.”
“Indeed, the Department determined before Election Day that no charges would be filed in this matter, although it did not inform the public until well after the election,” the report says. It was not until Jan. 15, 2021, that Freed’s successor publicly announced that no charges would be filed.
The report says Freed’s behavior violated some rules.
The Justice Department has internal rules and policies regarding how federal investigators should conduct and disclose details of investigations, including a “long-standing policy prohibiting Department employees from commenting publicly on ongoing, uncharged investigations,” the report said.
The report focused on determining whether Freed’s public statements and Barr’s participation in them, as well as Barr’s conversation with Trump, were inconsistent with that policy.
The report said Freed’s statements “raise questions” about whether department policy was violated and why the statements were made public during an election cycle, particularly because the statements included “the name of a candidate for whom votes were cast on the rejected ballots.”
The policy, Election Year Sensitivities Memorandum, tells department employees that they “may never time public statements (attributed or otherwise) … on any matter or occasion for the purpose of influencing any election or for the purpose of providing an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” The policy is intended to protect the Department’s “reputation for integrity, neutrality, and impartiality,” the report states.
Ultimately, the inspector general’s report concluded that Freed’s actions violated some Justice Department policies, but that Freed and Barr did not engage in misconduct because of ambiguity in the attorney general’s authority to approve the release of statements. The report also concluded that while the inspector general was “concerned” that Barr had provided Trump with details about the investigation, it was not a policy violation.
The inspector general said the case will be referred to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate possible violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits executive branch employees from using “official authority or influence to interfere with or influence the results of an election.”
The one released by Trump nominated for U.S. Attorney in 2017He denied to investigators that he had acted with political motives.
The incident highlights the dangers of disinformation.
Claire WardleAn associate professor at Cornell University who studies misinformation and disinformation, said incidents like the one in Luzerne are not uncommon because elections are often run by volunteers or people working for little pay. But in today’s partisan environment, the “mess” of the process has been reframed by people’s prejudices about elections.
“Whereas before, some of these human errors didn’t make the news, now we’re seeing what is a very natural part of democracy being perverted,” she said. “In almost every case, it’s been resolved, but the problem we have now is people taking pictures and using them as a weapon to say, ‘look, you can’t trust the system.’”
Wardle said this year, news organizations should publish stories about how the system works and what problems can occur before they happen, rather than after. People should also think carefully about what they share on social media before they know all the facts, she said, because a proper investigation to determine what actually happened could take months.
“America is in a really dangerous place right now because people don’t trust the system… and the country will fail if there’s no trust in the system,” she said.
Carter Walker is a Votebeat reporter in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
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