‘Election Deniers’ In Pennsylvania And Iowa Refuse To Concede

Funny how the times change. 

Four years ago, Democrats and their pals in corporate media began painting then-President Donald Trump and Republicans who questioned the results of the troubled 2020 election as “election deniers.” Now, Democrats are doing all they can — including breaking election law — to challenge GOP victories in Iowa and Pennsylvania despite “insurmountable” odds. 

Even The Washington Post, part of the left’s corporate media public-relations team, sees the writing on the wall for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn. The entrenched incumbent lost to Republican challenger Dave McCormick by some 24,000 votes in a swing state election that helped Republicans take back the Senate with a comfortable majority. The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race for McCormick. But Casey and his party of election integrity deniers, led by Democrat political ambulance chaser Marc Elias (Hillary Clinton’s Russian dossier peddler), refuse to concede. Instead, Casey’s campaign has sought an expensive recount, and has no compunction about grinding election law under foot to tally enough votes to hold the seat.

‘Tipping the Scales’  

“Sen. Casey just refuses to accept the fact that he’s lost this election so he is costing taxpayers well over a million dollars” for a statewide recount, Linda Kerns, 2024 Pennsylvania Election Integrity Counsel for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, told The Federalist late last week on the “Simon Conway Show” in Des Moines.

The Democrat senator and his attorneys are pushing for invalid provisional and mail-in ballots not correctly signed or properly dated to be counted, contrary to a Pennsylvania court ruling.  Democrats on some county boards dismissed the law and the court ruling in agreeing to accept suspect and invalid ballots. 

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said Thursday.

“People violate laws anytime they want,” she added. “So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.” It was a troubling statement from a public official, and another in countless examples of why Democrats got their clocks cleaned in this month’s election. Voters have had more than enough of leftist-led lawlessness over the past four years. 

Even the Dem-friendly Washington Post editorial board can smell the desperation. The election lawlessness, too, now seems a bridge too for for the left-leaning WaPo board.   

“Democrats would surely protest if a Republican commissioner made the same statement [as Ellis-Marseglia] to justify tipping the scales for their party’s Senate nominee — and they would be right,” the editorial board wrote in a piece headlined, “Democrats thumb their nose at the rule of law in Pennsylvania.” “Elections need rules, established in advance of the voting, and those rules must be applied equally and consistently.”

The same newspaper, of course, joined a chorus of accomplice media outlets chiding swing state Republican Senate candidates, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin and Kari Lake in Arizona, for not conceding closely contested elections. The conservatives have raised election integrity questions, but neither has asked election officials and courts to break the law to reverse their opponents’ election leads.  

“Four years ago, many Republicans embraced Trump’s brand of denialism when he stoked far-fetched theories to try to undo his loss of the presidency. Now, they are largely staying silent amid scattered false claims of rigged elections in downballot races — and they’re calling on Sen. Bob Casey (D) to concede that he narrowly lost in Pennsylvania,” a team of leftist Washington Post reporters concluded in the piece — published a day before the editorial — that served as a defense of Casey’s recount call and a knock on Republicans mulling their own legal options. 

In Pennsylvania the math doesn’t look good for Casey, but he’s counting on the recount and a stack of invalid votes. 

“But even if Sen. Casey wins on these, there’s still not enough for him to win this election so he’s just desperately hanging on,” Kerns said. 

‘The Election Deniers are the Democrats’

It’s a similar situation in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, where Democrat Christina Bohannan’s campaign on Thursday sought a recount of the votes in an election in which incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by less than 1,000 votes. The purple district saw Miller-Meeks win her first term in 2020 by a final recount tally of just six votes. 

Bohannan’s path to victory appears unlikely, too, but the campaign said in a statement that a recount will ensure “that every voter is heard” and that they have “full trust in this process and will accept the results regardless of the outcome.” The Associated Press has yet to call the race. 

Miller-Meeks said the vote count, as it stands, is “insurmountable” and that the districtwide recount is an unnecessary expense to taxpayers. 

“In Iowa, all of the legal ballots have been counted, all of the provisional ballots and the military ballots have been counted. The counties have certified their election results and we remain ahead. We gained votes on election night,” the congresswoman told The Federalist Friday on the “Simon Conway Show” on NewsRadio 1040 WHO in Des Moines. “So it’s an insurmountable lead. But, yes, my concern is after the recount when we’re still ahead, which we will be, I’m very confident of that, they’re going to continue to deny the election and they may go on to do a contest and try to get ballots admitted that were illegal ballots.” 

Republicans have already secured enough victories to hold the House, but Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stave off defeat and a wider GOP majority in a handful of races yet to be called. Those include Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, two House races in California, and one each in Alaska and Ohio.  

Miller-Meeks said the tables have turned in the “election denier” narrative. 

“We’ve heard for four years how Republicans were a threat to democracy, they were going to overturn democracy. But really what is happening is that the election deniers, the people who are trying to thwart the rule of law, trying to thwart what a state constitution allows when it comes to elections, are the Democrats,” the Republican congresswoman said. 

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.