Ex-Republican Candidate Has Bonkers Defense for Stealing Ballots

A former Republican House candidate has been arrested and charged for stealing ballots in Indiana.

Larry L. Savage Jr. was charged with destroying or misplacing a ballot—a felony—and theft after he was captured on security footage nabbing two ballots in Madison County during testing of local voting machines, reported Fox59. The testing began at 10 a.m. on October 3 and was open to the public, according to court documents.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

After pocketing the ballots, Savage leaned over to a woman streaming the event on Facebook Live, telling her that there was a “fucked-up count.” Upon exiting, Savage approached a man outside the government facility and showed him the ballots in his pocket before the unidentified man patted him on his back.

After Savage left, the woman confronted election officials about whether they were missing any ballots, reported Fox59. Savage then joined the woman’s livestream, commenting via his account “Cardkiller57” that the facility was “3 ballots short.”

“Dontvtake [sic] anything,” Savage wrote in another comment.

Ironically, Savage had framed himself as a champion of election integrity in online forums.

When questioned by police, Savage admitted that he had taken the ballots but claimed that a woman at the facility had given him permission to do so. He insisted that he “wasn’t trying to steal from nobody.”

After being confronted with evidence revealing that he had never asked for permission to take the ballots, Savage admitted that he had lied.

“If you go to Payless, or go wherever, it says sample and you usually can take a sample,” Savage said, according to Fox59. “So that is the way I took it. I thought they were fake fucking ballots.”

Speaking with Fox59, Savage claimed that he was an elected official and that he was “just trying to fight for our country.” (Savage, a businessman, came sixth out of eight candidates in the Republican primary.)

Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said that Savage’s act was a deliberate attempt to “undermine our election process.”

“This was an act that feeds into that concern that a lot of voters have about the integrity of our process,” Cummings told Fox59. “And it simply wasn’t necessary. This is corruption. This is corruption at its core. To undermine our election process is unacceptable. And our office needed to take action.”

Donald Trump and his allies have corroded and undermined trust in the integrity of U.S. voting since he lost the presidential election in 2020, refusing to admit and rejecting mountains of evidence that the election was not “stolen” from him. Last week, Trump issued his first call to arms for the 2024 race, preemptively claiming on Truth Social that the November election is already rigged, mere days into early voting.

Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.

Donald Trump is already constructing his election fraud theory if he loses the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

On Wednesday morning, Trump made a baseless accusation that there is widespread voter fraud going on in the state. “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” wrote the Republican nominee on Truth Social. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

Trump’s alarmist rhetoric about election integrity in the swing state appears to only be escalating. On Tuesday, speaking in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump said he intended to sue Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia, for allegedly turning away voters who waited in long lines to receive mail-in ballots.

“There’s been lines like this for days across counties in PA,” wrote James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, on X .” Only for elections officials to come out and push people out of line and tell them to come back. Voter suppression!”

But the reality is different from the Trump team’s hallucination. “Contrary to what is being depicted on social media, if you are in line by 5 p.m. for an on-demand mail-in ballot application, you will have the opportunity to submit your application for a mail-in ballot,” wrote Bucks County on the Bucks County Government Facebook page.

Earlier this month, a viral video appeared to show election workers in Bucks County ripping up mail-in ballots that had been marked for Trump. However, on Friday, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, issued a joint statement explaining that the video was part of a Russian election disinformation plot.

This follows Trump’s similar claims earlier in the week, in which he singled out York and Lancaster counties. In a post late Monday night, Trump spread lies about thousands of fraudulent ballots and voter registrations, even making the widely inaccurate claim that one person had filled out 2,600 forms, which he again reiterated at the Allentown rally.

The reality is that those counties are going through their normal proceedings of verifying last-minute voter registrations and mail-in ballot applications. Any concerns were in fact already raised to law enforcement, according to county officials.

But in a state whose Republicans are nearly all election deniers, Trump’s flagrant lies don’t bode well for a close race come Election Day.

Suppressing votes just got a lot easier for a key Trump ally in Virginia.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday voted 6-3 to allow the Virginia election commission to resume a controversial voter purge program that has already wiped the names of 1,600 people from its voter rolls. The state says the program is designed to remove non-citizens, but two lower courts previously found the program is likely illegal.

All three of the court’s liberal justices—Justices Sonia Sotamayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented. 

Virginia’s Trump-loving governor, Glenn Youngkin, signed the controversial program into law and appealed legal challenges all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court made its decision Wednesday in a one-page order with no reasoning for the decision included.

The state of Virginia argued that the 1,600 people removed from the state’s voter rolls didn’t provide adequate proof of citizenship when registering to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But voting rights advocates argued Youngkin’s program violates the National Voter Registration Act’s ban on clearing voter rolls too close to Election Day.

In the end, the conservatives on the court decided to help out Republicans in the state. And while this decision is troubling, it is perhaps unsurprising for a majority that includes Judges Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito, each of whom have been chipping away at voting rights for some time now. 

This is a notable win for Republicans in an important state. It also shows that the highest court in the land will continue to reinforce Trump’s fear mongering about noncitizen voting. And if 1,600 voters sounds marginal, Virginia’s state legislature was decided by just one vote in 2017. It’s again clear that Republicans will go to absurd lengths to help Trump—and the rest of their party—win.

This story has been updated.

Trust in Democratic institutions is at an all-time low, and at least one man is celebrating the downfall.

According to a Gallup poll published earlier this month, public trust in the executive office and the legislative branches of government is practically abysmal, with just 40 and 34 percent of Americans, respectively, believing that the institutions are trustworthy.

But somehow, the news media got even more demerits, with confidence in the information apparatus hitting its lowest point on record this year. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the industry’s ability to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump celebrated his role in creating that sentiment, bragging to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that it was, largely, thanks to him.

“That is a lot of fake news. When they lose their final ounce of credibility, they’ll probably turn good again, because they’re losing so much credibility,” Trump said.

“You know when I first started running, their approval rating—the very, very beginning, before, maybe, I even started—it was like 92 percent favorable rating. You know what it is now? Twelve percent,” he continued. “I drove it down!”

“I drove it down, numbers. I’m very proud of it. I’ve exposed them as being fake,” he added.

And while his exact numbers may be wrong, Trump’s sentiment is, actually, correct. America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then–Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was. He also leveraged attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.

That year, confidence in news dropped by eight percentage points—the most in a single year since the metric was first recorded—and for the first time in U.S. history sank below 40 percent. It was dragged down, predominantly, by Republican respondents, whose faith in the media plummeted from 32 percent in 2015 to just 14 percent in 2016, while surveyed Democrats and registered independents reported relatively minor dents in their confidence.

Gallup began asking the question in 1972 and has seen the nation’s trust in the news media slowly drift down since it reached an all-time high of 72 percent in 1976, when investigative pieces on Watergate and the Vietnam War rocked the nation.

This year has shown the disheartening effects of that loss of trust: Newspapers and stations alike have laid off thousands of journalists, with dozens of major outlets downsizing or outright folding as the business side of the industry struggles to keep up with the market, the changing technological landscape (i.e., artificial intelligence), and rapidly changing leadership.

The same Republicans who were just yesterday telling America to grow thicker skin are clutching their pearls over a comment from President Joe Biden on Donald Trump’s supporters.

The collective meltdown comes after Biden spoke on a Get Out the Vote Zoom call hosted by Voto Latino on Tuesday evening, where he denounced the comedian at Trump’s rally who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

“Donald Trump has no character. He doesn’t give a damn about the Latino community.… Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” Biden said on the call. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s—his hatred, his demonization of Latinos, it’s unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

Trump and his biggest fans quickly jumped on the remark, claiming that Biden meant “supporters” plural, while the former president said that he was specifically referring to Hinchcliffe.

“While I am running a campaign of positive solutions to save America, Kamala Harris is running a campaign of hate,” former President Donald Trump posted on X early Wednesday morning. “Now, on top of everything, Joe Biden calls our supporters ‘garbage.’ You can’t lead America if you don’t love the American People.”

“This is disgusting,” J.D. Vance wrote on X. “Kamala Harris and her boss Joe Biden are attacking half of the country. There’s no excuse for this. I hope Americans reject it.”

Senator John Cornyn—who remained suspiciously quiet as Trump and Vance spread made-up rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets—called the comments “despicable.” Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde even used it in a campaign ad equating it to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment in 2016.

Even if Biden had meant “supporters” plural, this kind of moral grandstanding is just disingenuous. This is a campaign that has referred to the vice president as a “devil,” said she had “pimp handlers,” made up pet-eating rumors that led to bomb threats shutting down Springfield, Ohio, and then still has the nerve to tell everyone to “stop getting so offended” when people get appropriately offended. They don’t have much room to talk.