USA: Benedictine Sisters respond to bogus accusation of voter fraud

The Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Mount St Benedict Monastery in Pennsylvania, have responded to "false and misleading information" about their membership, posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a Trump campaigner.

The Sisters said in a press release today:

'A number of concerned persons in various states alerted the Sisters to a new post on X that claimed 53 voters were registered at the monastery's address and "NO ONE lives there." The poster, Cliff Maloney of PA CHASE, claimed: "Our attorney's are reviewing this right now. We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes."

According to a March 2024 post from the Lincoln Institute, "The 'PA Chase' is an effort led by Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania (CAP) to knock on 500,000 doors and raise the GOP (Republican) mail-in ballot statewide total from 20% to 33%." Cliff Maloney is listed as the CEO of Citizens Alliance.

The Benedictine Sisters take no issue with knocking on doors to increase citizen participation in elections. We do take issue with claiming false information as true in an effort to discredit differing views or affiliations.

"We want to call Cliff Maloney to account for his blatantly false post that accuses our sisters of fraud. We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie. We also want to alert those who subscribe to X and other social media platforms to be vigilant and seek additional information before accepting these posts as truth," said Sister Stephanie Schmidt, prioress. "A free republic depends on free and fair elections. It depends equally on a discerning and conscientious citizenry who do not unquestioningly accept the word of anyone who has a social media platform."

We recognize that many persons and organizations are victims of similar untruths that appear daily in social and other media. We are sharing our experience in an effort to increase scrutiny and to encourage others to ask questions and seek information. We want to be on public record as having called out this fraud so that if the outcome of next month's election is contested in Pennsylvania our integrity will not be called into question. We are also pursuing legal counsel regarding this public defamation.'

LINK

Benedictine Sisters of Erie: https://eriebenedictines.org/