Thousands of last-minute challenges to voters’ mail ballot applications, along with baseless claims by former President Donald Trump about an investigation into suspicious voter registration forms, are adding 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 engaged in a series of legal battles over its election rules.
Officials in 14 counties reported receiving more than 4,000 challenges by last Friday, which was the deadline for contesting an absentee voter’s eligibility, according to Matt Heckel, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State.
The counties that received challenges include Allegheny, Beaver, Bucks, Centre, Chester, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lehigh, Lycoming and York counties.
On Monday, local officials dismissed all 354 challenges in south-central Pennsylvania’s York County during an emergency hearing, county spokesperson Greg Monskie confirmed.
The move comes after 212 challenges in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester County, the first to hold a hearing to review challenges, were either tossed or withdrawn last week.
Also in Lancaster County, local officials confirmed Monday that the majority of the approximately 2,500 voter registration forms they flagged as suspicious last month have turned out to be aboveboard.
So far, elections officials have confirmed that 17% are fraudulent and 26% are still under investigation, Ray D’Agostino, a Republican county commissioner, said at a meeting of the board of elections for the county, home to more than 366,000 registered voters.
Pennsylvania’s state Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, confirmed last week that her office is working with a total of four counties, including Berks, Monroe and York, to investigate the sources of fraudulent forms.
Henry’s office emphasized that “safeguards” built into how counties register eligible voters thwarted these attempts to corrupt voter registration lists.
Still, during a campaign rally in Lancaster County on Sunday, Trump made the unfounded allegation that local officials there “found 2,600 ballots” completed by “the same hand.”
On his social media platform, the Republican presidential nominee has claimed without evidence that there are “large scale levels” of “cheating” in Pennsylvania. Many election watchers say the Trump campaign is laying the groundwork to question the swing state’s election results.
Mail ballot challenges by right-wing activists and a sitting Republican member of Pennsylvania’s state Senate are also raising concerns among many election observers.
In a statement, Heckel said “bad-faith mass challenges” to absentee ballot applications 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 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.
A smaller batch that a handful of counties received in late October contested the residency of registered voters in the U.S. based in part on change-of-address forms they filed with the U.S. Postal Service.
Data from those forms, All Voting is Local and other voting rights groups say, is often part of flawed methodologies for mass voter challenges.
