So what’s to stop a losing candidate from gathering enough confederates to swing the election his way, successfully challenging their ballots, and getting them to say they voted for the other guy?
If our democracy is relying on the honor system, we’re in big trouble.
I agree, this is a ridiculous situation where you can vote for candidate A, then claim you voted for candidate B and deduct a vote from the total. On what basis are these votes considered invalid?
Just so no one gets a completely wrong idea about how vote challenging works, AIUI a vote must be shown to have been invalid in some way per election laws. For instance, if a particular ballot is alleged to be spoiled, or if a voter is alleged to have been ineligible to vote in some way, that would be a legitimate challenge.
OTOH, the one cite I’ve seen which talked about this particular effort listed a challenge to the vote of one of Thad Cochrane’s campaign people, who is alleged to have had “no reason for casting an absentee ballot.” If the challenges are mostly at that level, I hope a judiciary smackdown is in store for the challenger.
There is apparently some vague language in the law saying that a voter for a primary candidate must intend to vote for that candidate in the general, but from what I’ve read it is considered unenforceable.
If I had to make up a way to challenge votes, I would look into the voting history of everyone who voted in the Republican primary, and see if they have a past history of voting in Republican or Democratic primaries (there might be a way to do this, or maybe not), and if they have a history of voting in Democratic primaries, I’d challenge the vote in hopes of getting a direct admission that they were crossing party lines just to spoil the “integrity” of the Republican primary.
In some parts of the country, this is actually a common attitude among evangelicals towards anyone who won’t join their group and submit to their authority. They claim to be all about Jesus, but really they use their beliefs to justify hate. Funny, eh?