The 9 discarded Pennsylvania ballots fiasco

You've probably seen or heard the bruhaha about this story.  Politico has the latest, which you can read here.

The bottom line is it was done by a temporary employee, and is being investigated.  Barr and Trump are trying to use the incident to further discredit mailed ballots.  Of course they are.

“It is really improper for DOJ to be putting out a press release with partial facts,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told POLITICO on Thursday. “And it is career-endingly improper to designate the candidate for whom the votes are cast. There is no federal statute on which the identity of the preferred candidate depends.”

  Politico

If it ends anybody's career, it won't be anybody at the currently inappropriately named Department of Justice.

The Trump team and state Republicans have sued Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth and a Democrat, to try to ban drop boxes for mail ballots, toss out so-called “naked ballots," and allow poll watchers to volunteer outside of their county. They argued in the case that “unmonitored mail-in voting ... provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos.” Last month, Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan ordered the Trump campaign to provide evidence of voter fraud, and it failed to come up with proof with mail ballots.

So they're out to find some - or perhaps make some?

The campaign has a new court deadline, Mikus said, for discovery on Tuesday. “Now they have a deadline before the same federal judge to offer some evidence that voter fraud is rampant here in Pennsylvania,” he said. "The timing is surely suspicious.”

The White House knew of the investigation in the count ahead of Thursday's Justice Department press releases. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany teased the forthcoming announcement from the briefing room podium the investigation before it was made official, and Trump himself alluded to it in a Fox News Radio interview earlier in the day.

On Friday, ABC News first reported that Attorney General Bill Barr personally briefed Trump on the investigation prior to it being announced — which POLITICO has not independently confirmed.

[...]

Luzerne County officials, however, expressed confidence in the process that had identified and disclosed the discarded ballots.

“While the actions of this individual has cast a concern, the above statement shows that the system of checks and balances set forth in Pennsylvania elections works,” Pedri said in his statement. “An error was made, a public servant discovered it and reported it to law enforcement at the local, state and federal level who took over to ensure the integrity of the system in place.”