Mail ballot challenges are dropped in Pennsylvania shortly after Election Day

Just days after Election Day, right-wing activists and two Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania withdrew the majority of last-minute challenges filed against voters’ mail ballot applications.

Around 77% of more than 4,400 challenges were withdrawn on Wednesday or Thursday, including in Allegheny, Bucks, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Lancaster and Lehigh counties, NPR has confirmed. The removals come after more than 100 challenges were withdrawn on or before Election Day in Centre and Chester counties.

To voting rights groups and many of the affected voters, the withdrawal of more than 3,400 challenges coming right after a successful election for the GOP underscores that these formal objections to voter eligibility were baseless.

And all of the county election boards who have held emergency hearings to review the remaining challenges agreed that the challenges carried no weight. Since Nov. 1, officials have rejected more than 900 challenges in Beaver, Chester, Delaware, Lawrence, Lycoming, Washington and York counties.

Most of the challenges were filed days before Election Day and focused on the eligibility of U.S. citizens living abroad who are eligible to vote in federal elections in Pennsylvania under the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, while a smaller group questioned the residency of registered voters in the U.S. based on change-of-address forms they filed with the U.S. Postal Service.

All of them, according to Matt Heckel, a Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson, were part of “bad-faith mass challenges” that have added extra pressure on election officials in 15 counties across the state who have been facing intense public scrutiny this year for another high-stakes election.

The withdrawal of the bulk of these challenges this week led election officials to cancel multiple public hearings they scrambled to add to calendars amid running polling sites, counting ballots and reporting results.

It’s not clear why Pennsylvania state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, a Republican who filed a total of 1,713 challenges to overseas voters’ ballot applications in Bucks and Lehigh counties — the largest batch of challenges — stood down on Wednesday, the day after Election Day. In a statement to NPR, Coleman said he remained concerned that county election officials “were not registering the voters who applied for a federal ballot as required by law.”

“I will continue to pursue the matter through legislative oversight and potential changes to Pennsylvania law that will clarify the current requirement for the registration of federal voters in our statewide voter registration system,” Coleman said.

Republican state Sen. Cris Dush voiced similar concerns during a hearing Tuesday before withdrawing challenges in Centre and Clinton counties.

County election officials, however, have maintained that they are properly entering these overseas voters into Pennsylvania’s system for managing voter rolls. Under federal law, these voters, who indicate on registration forms that their intent to return to the U.S. is uncertain, are eligible to cast ballots for federal elections in the district where they last lived in the United States.

Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, says under state law, election officials cannot register these overseas voters as Pennsylvania voters so they are, instead, entered into a separate part of the registration database as federal voters.

These challenges, Walczak adds, were an “inappropriate” use of Pennsylvania’s legal process for contesting the eligibility of mail-in ballot voters.

“Whether this really was an effort to try to disenfranchise these individuals or whether it was intended to create chaos in elections systems and processing, which to some extent it did, or whether it's designed to promote some kind of conspiracy theories about how the elections don't work and how much chaos there is, it's impossible to tell,” Walczak says. “Bottom line is these are meritless challenges that never should have been made, that inconvenienced thousands of voters and made it much more difficult for countless elections officials and workers to be able to do their jobs at a very difficult and stressful time.”

For Christine Dax, a challenged overseas voter who was born and raised in Lehigh County, Pa., it’s been a nerve-wracking week watching the controversy unfold from Melbourne, where she has lived for about seven years with her husband, who is Australian.

Dax learned about Sen. Coleman’s challenge to her mail-in ballot application through an email a county official sent on Election Day, more than a month after she received confirmation that her ballot was received in October.

“It was very confusing, and I was like, ‘Have I done something wrong? Have I filled something out wrong?’ ” explains Dax, who says she has voted in every election for which she’s been eligible.

After finding news articles reporting that other mail-in voters’ ballot applications had been challenged across Pennsylvania, Dax says it became clear to her that this was a “bogus attempt to suppress people's votes.”

“It's very clear that our votes are legal. It's very clear that we've done nothing wrong,” Dax adds. “And it's clear that they're just using this as an insurance policy should their candidate not win. And it's especially enraging because now that their preferred candidate has won, now it's all gone away. It's all, ‘No big deal. Business as usual. Hope everyone forgets.’ But I haven't forgotten — definitely won't be forgetting that.”

One challenger in Lawrence County, Pa., however, has indicated she is not prepared to move on.

During a hearing Friday before local election officials, Carrie Hahn, a county resident who submitted 52 challenges, explained that she was not questioning whether these voters have the right to vote, but whether or not they should be entered into Pennsylvania’s voter registration system.

“This was not a partisan issue when I filed it at all,” said Hahn, who noted she is “very involved” in the Lawrence County Republican Committee and learned after filing the challenges that the ballot applications she contested are “heavily weighted in the Democrats’ favor.”

Seconds after the three commissioners of the county’s election board unanimously denied all of the challenges, Hahn said she plans to appeal.

Edited by Benjamin Swasey