Jarrett Coleman used to be a commercial pilot. I could call into question how he went through three employers between 2013 (when his career reportedly started) and 2021 (when he was elected to his local school board), I don’t know how far out of the norm that is in the airline industry, though, so instead I’ll just mention it in passing as a vague suggestion of worthlessness.

Unfair? Almost certainly. But no more so than what Coleman, now a state senator in Pennsylvania, just did to 500-odd absentee voters, throwing a pile of form-letter challenges at a local elections board to try to get their ballots rejected.

This doesn’t look at first glance like “classic” voter suppression, in which Coleman (a Republican and apparent Trumpist) would want votes from Dem-leaning areas and demographics not counted, because “American living overseas” isn’t a coherent demographic and doesn’t obviously lean left or right (though some Dems have tried to coax them leftward).

What it looks like instead is Coleman and some other like-minded local pols trying to plant evidence of a voter fraud conspiracy, in case the Assclown loses. (Here he is bragging up his diligence in fighting some unidentified “group that is suspected of submitting fraudulent applications elsewhere in the commonwealth”.)

I haven’t voted in almost a decade now, and this still irks me. I’m less worried about people’s right to vote than people’s right to know, and it’s harder to find out about actual collusion, chicanery, and other fuckery when choads like this are spreading false evidence of some nonexistent conspiracy.

Via Leonard French, who you might know of as a copyright lawyer; his ballot was one of those challenged.