More than 4,000 ballots have been challenged in 14 Pennsylvania counties, leaving election officials to decide their eligibility in hearings that will last well beyond Election Day.
State election officials say the “mass challenges” focused on two separate groups: people who may have forwarded their mail without also changing their voter registration, and non-military U.S. voters living abroad. The overseas voters are only entitled to cast their votes under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act for presidential and congressional seats.
The state had a 5 p.m. deadline Friday for anyone to submit mail-in ballots; all ballots of voters whose applications were disputed must be retained until county election board officials hold a hearing to rule on the claims. Those hearings must take place no later than Friday, three days after Election Day.
Pennsylvania is a critical swing state that could be a decisive factor in the battle between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump, a very close race on the eve of Election Day. If the margin is tight, the 4,300 ballots in question could be enough to determine who wins the state and its 19 electoral votes.
The effort follows a federal judge’s ruling last week to dismiss a lawsuit from six Republican members of Congress who sought to have Pennsylvania election officials institute new checks confirming the eligibility and identity of military and foreign voters.
The county elections board’s first hearing, held Friday in Chester County, a Philadelphia suburb, resulted in the dismissal of all challenges made to mailing out ballots. It was claimed that people have moved and should have changed where they vote.
“The scary thing was that they sent this letter with a voter registration cancellation form and claimed that they had induced 2,300 voters to cancel voter registration” in Pennsylvania, Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell, a Democrat, said Monday.
The challenges cost $10 per voter and it is not entirely clear who submitted each one. In Chester County, they were filed by Diane Houser, a Trump supporter who said they were nonpartisan and from a grassroots network.
Lycoming County will hold a hearing Friday on the 72 challenges it received from Karen DiSalvo, an attorney with PA Fair Elections, a conservative group that has fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures. DiSalvo said she faced the challenges in her capacity as an individual and not as a member of any organization.
“The challenges filed simply indicate that county election officials must properly process the voter registration applications they already have for these candidates. Voters don’t have to do anything – they’ve all received their ballots. To resolve the eligibility issues identified in the challenges, county officials must properly register applicants,” DiSalvo wrote in an email.
In York County, all challenges — 354 — were rejected by the Board of Elections on Monday, but Chief Registrar Greg Monskie said the board agreed to keep the ballots separated for a period during which appeals can be filed.
The Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, said about 3,700 calls were made Saturday in 10 counties to mail ballots from out-of-state voters. There were also challenges pending in four counties against 363 voters based on supposed address changes — plus the 212 rejected or withdrawn in Chester County in that category.
Maxwell said those challenged included active-duty military members, students and people leaving Pennsylvania in search of medical care.
“It is alarming to me that someone would take such an approach to disenfranchise legitimate voters in Pennsylvania,” Maxwell said. “And I can’t think of anything less American than that.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania says filling out a change of address form doesn’t necessarily mean a voter has permanently left the state — these forms can also be used to forward mail.
There are also 52 challenges under review in Lawrence County, said Tim Germani, director of Voter and Elections Services in Lawrence, and it appears most, if not all, involve out-of-state mail-in voting requests. The Board of Elections may have to hold a hearing Friday, he said.
In the Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, where about 1,300 protests were filed — most of them by Republican Sen. Jarrett Coleman — officials tried to notify voters Monday of a hearing scheduled for early Thursday. Until then, those votes will be kept separate during vote counting, Bucks government spokesman Jim O’Malley said.
“We are doing our best to notify these voters today and that notification will include information on how to contact the Board of Elections,” O’Malley said in a telephone interview Monday.
A message seeking comment was left for Coleman.
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