2020 election deniers Steve Bannon and Jim Bognet accuse Democrats of plotting to steal the midterms

07 November 2022

Twice-convicted felon and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon declared on Monday's edition of War Room: Pandemic on Real America's Voice that Democrats will "pull every trick in the book" to keep their legislative majorities even if they lose in Tuesday's midterm contests.

Bannon played an instrumental role in former President Donald Trump's plot to overturn the 2020 election and was one of the chief promoters of the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol to fulfill Trump's foredoomed scheme to remain in power. Despite all of Trump's claims of fraud and theft having been thoroughly debunked by fact-checkers, ballot audits, recounts, and dozens of court cases, Bannon has continued to spread the Big Lie.

Bannon's latest projections occurred during a conversation with Republican House hopeful Jim Bognet of Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, who echoed Bannon's accusations that Democrats are trying to rig the vote by messing with mail-in and absentee ballots. Bognet is but one of hundreds of GOP candidates throughout the nation who refuse to accept that Trump lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden.

"The one other thing I wanna tell you, Steve, the Democrats are already playing games. They've already in Monroe and Luzerne County, started playing games with the mail-in ballots, trying to reissue mail-in ballots where mistakes were made," Bognet said.

That statement is a gross misrepresentation of what is happening in the Keystone State.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP are suing Pennsylvania elections officials over a court ruling that took effect on November 1st that disqualified mail-in ballots that are either improperly dated or missing a date on their envelopes. More than a million Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail.

"This refusal to count timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of a trivial paperwork error violates the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act, which makes it unlawful to deny the right to vote based on an ‘error or omission’ on a voting-related ‘record or paper’ that is 'not material in determining whether [a voter] is qualified under State law to vote in [the] election," the lawsuit states. "Because mail ballots in Pennsylvania may, under state law, be completed at 'any time,' and because their timeliness is determined by when a local county board of elections receives and date-stamps the ballot, the presence or absence of a handwritten date on the envelope is utterly immaterial to determining whether the ballot was timely received, much less to assessing a voter’s qualifications."

Bognet nonetheless maintained to Bannon that organizations' legal challenge is a form of underhanded trickery.

"They don't care really about what the law is. We have to beat them tomorrow. We have to get this country moving again on oil and gas. But we really need to focus – I've had to go out and hire a ton of lawyers yesterday to flood the courthouses to make sure the Democrats don't pull any games," he said. "So if your audience can help us... it would really mean a lot."

Bannon agreed, and without citing any evidence repeated his allegations that Democrats are engaging in election rigging.

'They're going to play every game in the book. Here's why. They understand that when Jim Bognet gets elected, they're out of power for a decade in the House. They understand what's about to happen, and so they're going to pull every trick in the book. They're not going to – they will not lose graciously," he said. "This is going to be very nasty and it's going to be very tough and we're going to be gentlemen and gentlewomen about it but steely resolve. There's no chance they're going to steal any of this. This is not happening now, right? People are very focused."

Bognet then predicted that 2022 is "going to be a thunderclap. It's going to be a starting gun for the 2024 presidential election. We are going to embarrass and humiliate Joe Biden in his hometown of Scranton, PA."

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

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