Mail-in ballots are displayed during a processing demonstration on Sept. 30 at the Bucks County Board of Elections office in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Across Pennsylvania, more than 4,000 mail-in ballot objections have been filed, most of them against overseas voters. Hannah Pierre/Getty Images hide caption
Toggle caption Hannah Pierre/Getty Images
PHILADELPHIA — Thousands of last-minute challenges to voters’ mail-in ballot applications, coupled with baseless claims by former President Donald Trump about an investigation into questionable voter registration forms, are increasing the pressure on Pennsylvania county officials in the final hours before Election Day.
Pennsylvania has more electoral votes (19) than any other presidential swing state, and the major parties have in recent weeks been engaged in a series of legal battles over election rules.
Officials in 14 counties reported they had received more than 4,000 objections by last Friday, the deadline to challenge an absentee voter’s eligibility, according to Matt Heckel, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Counties that received challenges include Allegheny, Beaver, Bucks, Center, Chester, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lehigh, Licking and York counties.
Local officials on Monday rejected all 354 appeals in south-central Pennsylvania’s York County during an emergency hearing, county spokesman Greg Munsky confirmed.
The move comes after 212 challenges in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester, the first to hold a hearing to review challenges, were either raised or withdrawn last week.
Also in Lancaster County, local officials confirmed Monday that the majority of about 2,500 voter registration forms they flagged as suspicious last month turned out to be above deck. Republican county commissioner Ray D’Agostino said at a meeting of the county elections board, which has more than 366,000 registered voters, that election officials have so far confirmed 17% of them are fraudulent and 26% are still under investigation. .
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, confirmed last week that her office is working with four counties, including Berks, Monroe and York, to investigate the sources of the fraudulent forms. Henry’s office stressed that “safeguards” built into how counties register eligible voters thwarted such attempts to corrupt voter registration rolls.
However, during a campaign rally in Lancaster County on Sunday, Trump made unsubstantiated claims that local officials there “found 2,600 ballots” that were completed “by the same hand.” On his social media platform, the Republican presidential candidate claimed, without evidence, that there were “widespread levels” of “cheating” in Pennsylvania. Many election observers say the Trump campaign is laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the election results in the swing state.
Mail-in ballot challenges by right-wing activists and a Republican Pennsylvania state senator are also raising concerns among many election observers.
Heikal said in a statement that “bad-faith mass appeals” of absentee ballot requests were filed in coordination across the state. The vast majority — about 3,700 challenges — are focused on U.S. citizens living abroad who are registered to vote in federal elections in Pennsylvania under the federal Uniform Voting and Citizens Absentee Abroad Act.
A smaller group received by a group of counties in late October objected to registered voters’ residency in the United States, based in part on change of address forms they submitted to the U.S. Postal Service. Other voting rights groups say the data from these models, which say “all votes are local,” are often part of flawed methodologies for collective voter challenges.
“These challenges are based on theories that have been repeatedly rejected by the courts, and appear to be two separate and coordinated efforts to undermine confidence in the November 5 elections,” Heikal said.
Last week, officials in Chester County, a suburb west of Philadelphia, rejected more than 180 local voter appeals filed by county resident Diane Hauser, who said she was working with a group called Fair PA Elections as part of a “statewide effort “. During a three-hour hearing, Houser ultimately withdrew 29 objections after registered voters — including a law enforcement officer and a military service member’s spouse — rejected evidence of their current residency in the county. Seconds after Houser’s attorney, Megan Wagner, raised , the possibility of appealing the decision of Chester County officials, Houser said she would not appeal.
Fair Elections PA is also part of a Republican-led effort challenging the eligibility of overseas voters, including military members, in Pennsylvania, as well as swing states like Michigan and North Carolina. Judges have dismissed two of the three lawsuits, including a federal case led by a group of US House Republicans from Pennsylvania. After two North Carolina lower courts denied their request, the Republican National Committee is now asking the state Supreme Court to order some overseas voters’ returned ballots to be invalidated and not counted until their eligibility is confirmed.
Bucks County, a politically purple suburb of Philadelphia, received nearly 1,200 mail-in ballot challenges against foreign voters, the largest batch of all counties. All of those appeals were filed about 15 minutes before the deadline last week by Pennsylvania state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, who represents a district in Bucks and Lehigh counties, Jim O’Malley, a county spokesman, said in an email.
Coleman did not immediately respond to NPR’s multiple requests for comment.
The ACLU says this campaign not only wastes public resources, but also jeopardizes the voting rights of foreign citizens eligible to cast ballots in federal elections in the district where they last lived.
“Challenging these voters based on their status as federal electors in the UOCAVA is not an appropriate use of the challenge process,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and Ari Savitsky of the ACLU Voting Rights Project wrote in a public letter. Pennsylvania District Attorney. “Challengers may disagree with Congress’s decision to expand federal voting rights to these American citizens (and with the past five decades of consistent compliance with federal law across the country on this point).”
Officials are trying to notify all overseas voters whose eligibility is being challenged before they decide whether they should be allowed to cast absentee ballots, and it is unclear how quickly they can complete that process. Some counties have scheduled public hearings on challenges in the days following Election Day, and officials are scheduled to continue accepting ballots from overseas voters for up to a week after Tuesday.
The close race in Pennsylvania, where thousands of ballots could determine which presidential candidate wins, could further highlight this ongoing debate.
In Center County, dealing with nearly a hundred challenges is not easy for just local election officials, who are focused on setting up polling sites for voting on Tuesday.
“We’re already very busy, and that doesn’t include people trying to break democracy,” says Mark Huggins, Democratic chairman of the County Board of Commissioners. “This is not normal.”
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
