Alerted by social posts about shut-down voting lines in Bucks County, the Trump campaign raced to court Tuesday to fight the closure. After a hearing the following day, Judge Jeffrey Trauger said turning away voters who were in line to get their ballot violates Pennsylvania election law.
Youngkin utilized election law signed by Dem governorChad Groening, AFN.net A Virginia-based conservative activist says he is pleased the state’s Republican governor defended an election law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 6-3 vote, the high court granted an emergency appeal from Gov. Glenn Youngkin. He sought the appeal after a federal judge had ruled the state government was not allowed to purge approximately 1,600 non-citizens from its voter rolls. 
In its legal argument, the Biden administration argued the National Voter Registration Act – the “Motor Voter” law passed in 1993 – bans removing voters from the rolls 90 days from an election. Youngkin issued an order August 7, the 90th day before the election, to require the state to compare data from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles with voter rolls to identity any non-citizens on the rolls. Gary Bauer, of the Campaign for Working Families, tells AFN the election law Youngkin is utilizing has been used for years to monitor voter rolls. The law was signed by then-Gov. Tim Kaine in 2006. “The outrageous thing about this story,” Bauer says, “is that the law Virginia is using was passed when there was a Democrat governor, and there was a bipartisan agreement that only U.S. citizens in Virginia should vote.” |
More importantly, Judge Trauger’s one-page order extended early voting for two additional days, through Friday, this week.
Pennsylvania election law allows voters to apply in-person for a mail-in ballot, so Bucks County voters were standing in a long line Tuesday – some as long as three hours – outside a courthouse to receive their ballot from election officials.
What alerted the Trump campaign was video footage, posted to X, that showed two uniformed police officers informing voters they had missed the deadline to get in line for their ballot. That deadline is 5 p.m. but voters in line said the officers (who might actually be courthouse security guards) were shutting down the line at approximately 2:30.
That damning X post got noticed by James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director. Reacting to it, he challenged Gov. Josh Shapiro (pictured above) in an X post to explain the early closure after the Governor had stated, in his own previous X post, that the lines for main-in ballots would remain open until 5 o’clock.
Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, tells AFN the judge’s order to extend early voting was the “fair thing to do” because some voters were being turned away. She was told one of the ballot lines was shut down at 1:45 by courthouse officials.
“So I'm glad the judge had some common sense,” she says, “and saw the disenfranchisement of these voters in this situation."
Pennsylvania, one of several battleground states for both Trump and Kamala Harris, is being described as a must-win state, too. The Keystone State will give the winner 19 electoral votes in a close election in which that win, or loss, could decide who hits 270 electoral votes.
Joe Biden officially won Pennsylvania in 2020 50%-48% over Trump, a difference of approximately 80,500 votes from 6.8 million votes cast.
Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia, officially chose Biden over Trump 51%-47% four years ago. Approximately 17,300 votes separated the candidates.
Bucks County is known as a Democrat stronghold, Gramley says, but she knows there are a lot of conservatives who live there, too.
"And President Trump needs every single voter," she says.
