“It reminds me of the criticism we’ve leveled at authoritarian governments who, under the guise of democracy, have tried to control and limit the counting of votes,” said former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, a Republican who served as homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush. “There is no place for it in America.”
Mr. Ridge, a chair of a voting-rights group called VoteSafe who supported Mr. Biden in 2020, denounced the Trump campaign’s “hot and unnecessary rhetoric around bogus claims.”
Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader and a member of the National Council on Election Integrity, which was behind some of the Pennsylvania ads, called the Trump campaign’s rhetoric “corrosive.”
“It is dangerous because if people question the outcome of the election they are really questioning the essence of our democratic republic,” Mr. Daschle said. Among the other board members of the group airing “count every vote” ads in Pennsylvania was Dan Coats, Mr. Trump’s first director of national intelligence.
