On December 1, the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society held a press conference on “election whistleblowers” in Arlington, Virginia, where Jesse Morgan, who claims to work for the U.S. Postal Service as a subcontractor truck driver, came forward with allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Morgan alleges that he drove hundreds of thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots across state lines, from Bethpage, New York, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The Thomas More Society is a conservative, Chicago based nonprofit, described as a “national public interest law firm dedicated to restoring respect in law for life, family, and religious liberty.” The Amistad Project, as reported by the Washington Post, is “dedicated to election integrity,” and described by the Thomas More Society as being “focused on protecting your constitutional rights by stopping the aggressive overreach of government officials misusing emergency police powers.”
For context, it’s worth noting that the director of the Amistad Project, Phill Kline, is the former Kansas attorney general who was indefinitely suspended from practicing law in Kansas in 2018, for engaging in “unethical tactics and committed professional misconduct during his investigations into abortion providers,” as reported by the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Morgan’s claim quickly went viral.
On December 2, Morgan was interviewed by Lou Dobbs for Fox Business. A clip of that interview has been viewed more than 93,000 times on Lou Dobbs’ Facebook page and more than 535,000 times on Twitter. President Trump also tweeted the Lou Dobbs interview as well as a clip of Morgan on Hannity, which has been viewed more than 2 million times.
There is no evidence to suggest that his claim is true. What’s more, Attorney General William Barr declared on December 1 that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the results of the 2020 election.
According to Morgan, on October 21, he delivered “ballots with return addresses filled out. Thousands of them. Thousands. Loaded onto my trailer in New York and headed to Pennsylvania.” Morgan said he wondered why he was “driving complete ballots from New York to Pennsylvania.” He said he “didn’t know why, so I decided to speak up.”
Morgan explained in more detail the series of events that he described as “weird.”
While in Bethphage, New York, on October 21, Morgan said an expeditor made “three references to ballots that were to be loaded into my trailer including saying hey you have ballots today.” Morgan said that in total he saw “24 gaylords, or large cardboard containers of ballots” loaded on to his trailer. These gaylords, he explained, contained plastic trays of ballots “stacked on top of each other” with “handwritten return addresses.” Morgan said these were “complete ballots.”
Morgan then went on to explain that he would typically drive to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before Lancaster. He said when he drove to Harrisburg that day with the ballots, he wasn’t allowed to “offload” there, which he said was “different.” Instead, he claimed he waited for about six hours without an explanation, which he said “was weird.” Morgan then claimed he was told to wait for a transportation supervisor for the USPS, which he said “was also weird,” because the transportation supervisor isn’t someone he would typically interact with. The supervisor allegedly told Morgan “to drive to Lancaster without being unloaded in Harrisburg,” even though Morgan claims he knew the ballots were “loaded for Harrisburg.”
Much of what Morgan describes as “weird” centers around his claim that his trailer went missing after he parked it in a Lancaster postal facility. “My trailer was gone,” he said.
In sum, Morgan claims to have transported completed New York ballots to Pennsylvania.
Brett Hambright, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office in Lancaster, told The Dispatch Fact Check via email the following:
“We were made aware of this allegation. An allegation such as this one (involving multiple states) would typically be handled by a federal agency and our office would normally assist if requested. Our assistance has not been requested, but we will assist if asked. Additionally, we are confident that any ‘mail-in’ ballots dropped off in person in Lancaster are accounted for, as the drop-off box was monitored by camera.”
Craig Lehman, commissioner for the County of Lancaster also told The Dispatch Fact Check via email that “receiving absentee applications in which the registered PA voter requests their ballot to be mailed out of state, while it is not the norm, it is something that we see for every primary and general election.” He continued by explaining why this might come up: “Examples of the more common circumstances are: students who are attending college out of state, or even out of the country and PA residents who are on an extended visit in another state either visiting or caring for a loved one. We also see PA residents who may be in another state on a lengthy vacation which is long enough for them to receive mail at the address.”
On December 3, Fox News anchor Eric Shawn, challenged Morgan’s alleged voter fraud on a news segment hosted by Martha MacCallum. “The claim that completed ballots,” Shawn told MacCaullum, “were driven from Long Island, to Pennsylvania, and disappeared sometime in October, election officials tell me that just cannot happen.”
Shawn continued by explaining that “every ballot, they say, is matched to a voter and then they double check it and they confirm. They say you just can’t simply get hundreds of thousands of fake ballots or signed ballots somehow into the system.”
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