Forum

Tom Ranieri is a lawyer who volunteered as a representative of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, working at an Election Day hotline. He was there from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3 and joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to share what he observed.

Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on “The Daily Signal Podcast” by Tom Ranieri. He’s an associate attorney at Faughnan Mendicino. Tom, It’s great to have you with us on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Tom Ranieri: I am deliriously happy to be here myself.

The left is actively working to undermine the integrity of our elections. Read the plan to stop them now. Learn more now >>

Del Guidice: Well, thanks for making time to talk with us. First off, Tom, can you tell us where you have been working in Pennsylvania at the Election Day hotline and what you were observing?

Ranieri: Certainly. I was, as I would imagine many fellow people similarly situated to myself [were], watching with increasing concern as the Democrats attempted to change the rules of the election over the last year. Obviously, I think to make it more easy for them to pull the kind of tricks that I know that they’ve pulled in the past, having been from Pennsylvania.

I didn’t realize that they would be as brazen as they’ve been. And to a certain extent, as a Republican, you expect Democrats to cheat a little bit. And so you need to be on hand to make sure to hold them to account, make sure they follow the law because if left unobserved, they would just do whatever they wanted to do.

So I reached out to the Republican National Lawyers Association and volunteered my time. I told them anywhere they needed me [I’d go]—I’d be able to go to Florida, I’d be able to go to Pennsylvania. I’m from Virginia. I’d be happy to stay here. I just told them, “Send me where you want me and I will go and be content.”

And they got in touch with me a couple of weeks before Election Day and said, “We’ve decided that we really want you up in Pittsburgh. We have a bunch of people in Philadelphia, but we still need the Western Pennsylvania legal team to be bolstered, especially on Election Day.”

I said, “Absolutely, I’ll go.” So I drove up after work on Friday, October the 30th to the headquarters … in Allegheny County, which I’m not going to tell you where that is because I don’t want it to be targeted, but I went up there and we got plugged in.

And then for the first few days, what we did over that entire weekend to that Monday was we worked incredibly hard, getting poll watchers and canvas watchers signed up, trained and credentialed, so that they could legally observe the polls and legally observe the canvas locations.

On Election Day itself, I was asked to take the first shift. We had broken up the watching of the canvas into four shifts for that first day—from 7 to 11, 11 to 3, 3 to 7, 7 to 11—to have at least a couple of lawyers and several volunteers on hand to watch the pre-canvassers.

That is the people that are opening, verifying, and then counting the ballots that were sent absentee or mail-in, to watch to make sure that they followed the proper procedure in law and that everything was done above board.

Del Guidice: Tom, you were there, what did you see specifically on Election Day? Can you walk us through some of the things you observed as you were there?

Ranieri: Well, the first thing that happened was, I walked in to the pre-canvas location at 7 that morning, around 7:30, actually. And there was a line of people trying to get in to watch the pre-canvas. And this guard came up to me. This Allegheny County worker was manning the door and he was very agitated. I didn’t understand why, but he very much wanted to talk to me.

So he ended up talking to me for 15 minutes. And in the course of that 15 minutes, told me that he had observed them turning on the voting machine the day before, he had seen them running ballots through it. And when he asked them what they were doing, they told him that they were just removing deceased people, but you’re not supposed to do that until 7 a.m. on the day of the election. So, that was probably a lie.

So automatically, first thing I hear, eye witness testimony from a county worker that they had been tampering with the machine in Allegheny County before the day of the election and had been counting or otherwise using the machine to get votes or to do something before they were legally allowed to do so. So immediately, I’m thinking this is shady.

I try to get in, I see the canvas location. And then there are cameras in an entirely different section of the warehouse, pointed at where the canvas workers are working, but they are bad cameras. They’re not very good.

And there’s only a few of them and they are placed so far away that you can see the people who are counting the ballots, but you can’t see the ballots they’re counting, which is the whole purpose of having a canvas watcher. The canvas watcher is not there to watch people. He’s there to watch the ballots.

The reason it’s important is because the Pennsylvania law for absentee and mail-in ballots states very clearly that no mail-in ballot is valid where the outer envelope is noncertified by the elector, or as I say, the voter.

And if there is no secrecy ballot—that is to say, no secrecy envelope containing a ballot inside of the outer certifying envelope—it is not a valid ballot. It is called a naked ballot, and it should be put aside immediately.

And if the secrecy ballot inside of the outer certification ballot has any markings, which tend to identify the elector or his political preferences or in any way attempts to communicate to the person who’s looking at the secrecy ballot the preferences or desires of the elector, those are also immediately disqualified. They’re not valid votes and they should be put aside.

Now, as you can imagine, you need to be able to actually see the ballot for that to work. You have to see the certification. You have to see the signature. You have to see the date and the address. You have to see that there are no markings on the secrecy ballot, and you have to make sure there’s a secrecy ballot.

read more here: https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/11/06/a-pro-bono-lawyer-for-trump-campaign-shares-what-he-saw-in-pennsylvania/?