A conservative group and its former leader are taking the unusual step of publicly acknowledging that claims of ballot mishandling at a Pennsylvania post office in 2020 were wrong.

The conservative group Project Veritas and its former leader are taking the unusual step of publicly acknowledging that claims of ballot mishandling at a Pennsylvania post office in 2020 were untrue.

The statements from Project Veritas and founder James O’Keefe came as a lawsuit filed against them by a Pennsylvania postmaster was settled Monday.

The group produced videos in the wake of the 2020 presidential election based on claims from a postal worker in Erie, Pennsylvania, who said he had overheard a conversation between the postmaster and a supervisor about illegally backdating mail-in presidential ballots.

  • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
    171·
    9 months ago

    Wait, how would the post office be able to back-date them? Isn’t the date written by the voter, and the post handled largely digitally? As in, there’d be no way in hell for the claim to ever be true unless there is additional manual dating that the post office does specifically for mail in ballots? Even then, any automatic scanning is going to log something I’m sure at least for internal auditing purposes backdating wouldn’t match…

    … Why is it news they admitted to lying about an obvious farce!?

    Is this a situation where we’re confused because the face who always lies created a paradox by admitting to it?

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
      22·
      9 months ago

      So here’s what was going on… Pennsylvania passed a law requiring that mail in ballots have a hand-written date on the envelope in order to be valid.

      This is completely pointless, because a) you could write any date you wanted on an envelope, and b) the date that MATTERS is the postmark value.

      If a ballot is recieved in time, it doesn’t matter what the hand-written date says or doesn’t say.

      https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-voting-mail-ballot-date-lawsuit-86928b6ed5495e44fdb004dbc1e4302e

      Post office employee knew that and was like “yeah, post date it, it doesn’t matter.”

      Someone overheard that and though he was talking about post dating ballots that had arrived too late to be counted.

      That wasn’t TRUE, but then Project Veritas doesn’t operate based on what’s true. :)