Government

New Hampshire GOP Candidate Loves Voting So Much He Did It Twice

So civic minded!

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ballot box vote votingThe call is coming from inside the house! Again.

The Associated Press reports that New Hampshire Republican congressional candidate Matt Mowers voted twice in the 2016 presidential primary, according to public records. Mowers, who worked on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s campaign, cast an absentee ballot in the Granite State’s early primary. But when Christie’s campaign failed to get off the ground, Mowers re-registered in New Jersey, using his parents’ home address, and cast a second ballot there during its late-season contest.

The issue isn’t one of criminal liability, since the statute of limitations has expired for Mowers, who went on to work in the Trump administration. But it is awkward at a moment when the Republican party is fixated on Trump’s lies about a stolen election. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the party grandees seek to orient the party toward 2022, Trump has un-endorsed Alabama senate candidate Mo Brooks for his dastardly failure to remain laser focused on supposed fraud in 2020.

Even as he was campaigning in 2020, Trump continued to make the nonsensical claim that his loss in New Hampshire in 2016 was due to fraudulent ballots, not his own unpopularity.

“We won the primary tremendously. We should’ve won the [general] election, but they had buses being shipped up from Massachusetts, hundreds and hundreds,” he said at a rally. “And it was very close, even though they did.”

Not a single word of that is true. Nevertheless it has become Republican Orthodoxy that election fraud is rampant and the only plausible explanation for Democratic wins.

To make matters worse, Mowers isn’t even the first Republican inside a month to get caught engaging in apparent voting shenanigans. After New Yorker reporter Charles Bethea wrote that Mark Meadows and his wife had registered and voted using an address for a vacation trailer in North Carolina which they neither live in nor own, the couple are being investigated by the state Attorney General’s office for possible election crimes.

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All of which is a very bad look for a party trying to convince Americans that we’re suffering from an epidemic of election fraud and need to make drastic changes to our laws to protect the integrity of the ballot.

But Mowers, like his former boss, appear to possess a superpower: he lacks all sense of shame.

“Matt was proud to work for President Trump as the GOP establishment was working to undermine his nomination,” campaign spokesman John Corbett told the AP. “Matt moved for work and was able to participate in the primary in support of President Trump and serve as a delegate at a critical time for the Republican Party and country.”

Well, that explains it then. Nothing to see here.

Trump aide seeking NH House seat voted in 2 states in 2016 [AP]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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