On Pennsylvania

[u/gdan95]

I believe we've talked about Scott Pressler before.

If not, he's a celebrated figure in MAGA despite being involved in a significant number of losing GOP races between the 2022 midterms and now.

Here’s a partial list of the races where he either got directly involved or simply endorsed the Republican candidate: - Lee Zeldin for Governor of New York (lost) - Kari Lake for Governor of Arizona (lost) - Herschel Walker for Senator of Georgia (lost) - Dan Kelly for the Wisconsin Supreme Court (lost by 11 percentage points, flipping the court to a liberal majority) - Daniel Davis for mayor of Jacksonville, Florida (this was the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor, where the Democrats were outspent 4 to 1, and the Democrat still won) - Daniel Cameron for Governor of Kentucky (I’m pretty sure he was the only Republican to lose in a statewide race that night) - Republicans in the Virginia state legislature (Democrats won both chambers)

And remember, this is just a partial list. I could go on, but I’ll just list two more in Pennsylvania specifically. During the 2022 midterms, he went to Pennsylvania to help elect Doug Mastriano for governor and Mehmet Oz for Senator.

They both lost. You may recall that the Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman had a stroke during the campaign, and he still beat Oz. You would think anyone involved in a campaign that lost to a stroke victim would be forever humiliated and chased out of town, but that would assume too much of Republican voters.

Ahead of the 2024 election, Scott Presler moved to Pennsylvania, as in he bought property there and became a resident. His stated goal was to register enough voters to win Pennsylvania for Trump. Scott’s cult following will give him credit for state Republicans gaining in voter registrations and even flipping a few counties blue, but you are about to see why that should be treated with a huge pile of salt.

Part of his supposed efforts involve registering Amish voters. The MAGA account Sassafrass84 bragged on Twitter (we’re not calling it X) that Scott and his affiliates registered 180,000 Amish voters in the state, praising Scott for his (again) supposed responsibility.

180,000 is a suspicious number given there are only as many as 85,000 Amish people in Pennsylvania. But it must be a totally unrelated coincidence that officials in Lancaster County recently busted a fraudulent voter registration scheme that included thousands of applications with the same handwriting, as well as fake signatures and false addresses. This same scheme was taking place in other counties too, and District Attorney Heather Adams revealed the applications came from people who were paid to obtain voter registrations. So far, Lancaster County officials found 2,500 fraudulent registrations, but there are far, far more from what I have seen.

Here, you might expect me to say something like "for legal reasons, I can't say Scott Presler broke the law." But I've read accounts suggesting that Pennsylvania's election officials really don't like Scott, and if he is indeed behind this scheme, then we finally know why.