“Star Wars” star Mark Hamill joined forces with anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project for a new ad that targets President Donald Trump for attempting to restrict the counting of absentee ballots.
The spot, posted the day before Election Day, features a narration from Hamill that educates viewers about the history of absentee voting in the United States. Hamill, a vocal Trump critic, says absentee voting started during the Civil War and that Union soldiers used the process to cast their votes.
“Now, more than 150 years later, tyranny is looking for a new foothold,” Hamill says in the ad.
“If [Trump] gets his way, many who cast absentee ballots will not have their vote counted,” he continues. “This will deny thousands of troops serving overseas of their most sacred right, stripping the men and women in our military the very freedoms they’ve served and sacrificed to defend.”
In a monthslong effort to cast doubt on election results, Trump has aggressively — and without evidence — attacked the integrity of mail-in ballots and absentee voting. Counting mailed ballots after election night is a legitimate process, but doing so is expected to favor Democrats.
An unprecedented number of ballots have been cast by mail due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Trump has insisted that any ballots received after Election Day should not be counted — even if they are postmarked by Nov. 3. He has repeatedly said a winner should be declared on election night, although many states won’t be done counting mailed ballots by Tuesday night.
The president told reporters on Sunday that a recent Supreme Court decision that will allow ballots in Pennsylvania to be counted up to three days after the election was “terrible.”
“There is absolutely no reason for the Trump campaign to sow doubt and confusion over the process except to discourage people from voting and votes from being counted,” Reed Galen, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, said in a news release. “He’s doing this because the only way he can win is by cheating. We won’t allow it.”