Marshall Cohen for CNN:
An illegal voting scheme in Bridgeport, Connecticut, has become a rallying cry for former President Donald Trump and his supporters who are still pushing false claims about 2020 election security and trying to sow doubts ahead of the 2024 presidential contest.
While election experts say this fearmongering about fraud in US elections is overblown, they say the Connecticut case does highlight the potential vulnerabilities with mail-in voting.
Last week, a state judge nullified the results of September’s Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, which has a history of voting scandals. The judge said surveillance footage showed allies of the incumbent mayor stuffing hundreds of ballots into dropboxes, a clear violation of state law, which restricts who can handle mail-in ballots….
Whenever allegations of voter fraud crop up – regardless of whether they are true or false – they instantly become a smash hit in the right-wing ecosystem. This time around, the fraud was real.
Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who filed frivolous lawsuits in 2020 in hopes of overturning the results, posted about the Bridgeport scandal and celebrated the fact that “a court with integrity looks at evidence and orders new election!” and included the hashtag #elections2024. She pleaded guilty last month to state crimes in Georgia stemming from her separate attempts to interfere with the 2020 election results.
Musk, the billionaire who often promotes right-wing disinformation on his platform X, formerly known as Twitter, shared a story about the Bridgeport race getting overturned and said, “the only question is how common it is.”
The chairman of the Connecticut GOP used the incident to argue that ballot dropboxes should be banned nationwide.
And one of the organizers of the infamous Trump rally on January 6, 2021, Amy Kremer, connected Bridgeport to the last presidential election, falsely claiming “we had the same type of evidence on a much larger scale” in 2020. She has continued fanning the flames of supposed fraud and is calling for “audits in every county” in Kentucky, in response to the state’s Democratic governor winning re-election on Tuesday.