Thousands of Pennsylvania voters have had their mail ballot applications challenged

PHILADELPHIA — 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in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester County, the first to hold a hearing to review challenges, were either tossed or withdrawn last week.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.

“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected and appear to be two separate, coordinated efforts to undermine confidence in the Nov. 5 election,” Heckel said.

Last week, officials in Chester County, the suburb west of Philadelphia, rejected more than 180 challenges to domestic voters submitted by Diane Houser, a county resident who said that she was working with a group called PA Fair Elections as part of a “statewide effort.” During a three-hour hearing, Houser ultimately withdrew 29 challenges after registered voters — including a law enforcement officer and a spouse of a military service member — pushed back with evidence of their current residency in the county. Seconds after Houser’s attorney, Meaghan Wagner, raised the possibility of contesting the Chester County officials’ decision, Houser said she would not appeal.

PA Fair Elections is also part of Republican-led efforts that are challenging the eligibility of overseas voters, including military members, in Pennsylvania, as well as the swing states of Michigan and North Carolina. Judges have dismissed two of the three lawsuits, including a federal case led by a group of U.S. House Republicans from Pennsylvania. After two lower courts in North Carolina denied their request, the Republican National Committee is now asking the state’s Supreme Court to order that the returned ballots of some overseas voters be set aside and not counted until their eligibility can be confirmed.

Bucks County, a politically purple Philadelphia suburb, received close to 1,200 mail ballot challenges against overseas voters, the largest batch out of all the counties. All of those challenges were filed about 15 minutes before last week’s deadline by Pennsylvania state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, who represents a district in Bucks and Lehigh counties, Jim O’Malley, a county spokesperson, said in an email.

Coleman did not immediately respond to NPR’s multiple requests for comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union says this push is not only wasting public resources, but also putting at risk the voting rights of overseas citizens who are eligible to cast ballots for federal elections in the district where they last lived.

“Challenging these voters based purely on their status as UOCAVA federal voters is not an appropriate use of the challenge process,” Witold Walczak, the ACLU of Pennsylvania’s legal director, and Ari Savitzky of the ACLU’s voting rights project, wrote in a public letter to Pennsylvania’s county solicitors. “The challengers may disagree with Congress’s determination to extend federal voting rights to these U.S. citizens (and with the last five decades of unbroken compliance with federal law across the Nation on this point).”

Officials are attempting to notify all of the overseas voters whose eligibility is under challenge before deciding whether they should be allowed to cast their absentee ballots, and it’s unclear how quickly they can complete this process. Some counties have scheduled public hearings on the challenges in the days after Election Day, and officials are set to continue to accept overseas voters’ ballots up to a week after Tuesday.

A close race in Pennsylvania, where thousands of ballots could determine which presidential candidate wins, could put a larger spotlight on this brewing controversy.

In Centre County, dealing with just a hundred or so challenges is not easy for local election officials, who are focused on setting up polling sites for Tuesday’s voting.

“We’re already crushingly busy, and that doesn't count people who are trying to break democracy,” says Mark Higgins, Democratic chair of the county’s board of commissioners. “This is not normal.”

Edited by Benjamin Swasey