Pennsylvania election officials on Saturday confirmed that the ballots of some 4,000 mail-in voters across 14 counties are now in legal limbo, after a spate of legal challenges were filed ahead of a Friday deadline.
The challenges targeted mainly overseas voters, already the subject of an unsuccessful lawsuit filed by six of the state’s Republican congressmen, including Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Lancaster County.
Secretary of State Al Schmidt said Saturday the challenges are part of a statewide effort, but he said the voters should ultimately have their ballots counted.
“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected, and they appeared in two separate coordinated efforts to disenfranchise our voters,” Schmidt said during a Saturday news conference.
Referred to as federal voters, the subjects of the challenges are U.S. citizens who live abroad and do not have an intention to move back. They vote from their last registered U.S. address and are only entitled to cast votes in federal elections – president and Congress.
The challenges “seek to disenfranchise federal voters who are entitled, under federal law, to vote for federal offices,” Schmidt said.
A copy of a letter sent to a Pennsylvania county elections office challenging a mail-in voter describes what at first glance appears to be a loophole in the law. State law says someone has to be a registered voter to request a mail-in ballot, and people who permanently live abroad are not registered in the state. But a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act says citizens overseas can always request an absentee ballot that will only have the federal offices on it.
Michael Fitzpatrick, a spokesperson for the Lancaster County commissioners office, said in an email Friday night that the county Board of Elections received 723 challenges to mail-in voters. The three county commissioners, who make up the elections board, will discuss them at a board meeting on Monday, Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick did not respond to requests for more information. The county commissioners – Josh Parsons, Ray D’Agostino and Alice Yoder – did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.
The chair of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee, Tom O’Brien, said Saturday he had limited information about the challenges and couldn’t yet comment. Kirk Radanovic, chairman of the county Republican Committee, did not respond to a request for comment.
Lehigh and Chester counties
Dauphin County Elections Director Chris Spackman said the elections board there received 307 challenges to mail-in voters. Lehigh County received 519 application challenges from Republican state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, according to Lehigh elections director Timothy Benyo.
York County's chief clerk, Gregory Monskie, said the county had not received any challenges to mail ballots or to applications. But the county received 354 challenges to federal voters, who vote by mail, and have their data included in the Department of State's mail-in voting dataset. The information originally comes from the counties.
By state law, challengers must deposit $10 for each voter challenged. Coleman deposited $5,190 with Lehigh county, according to Benyo.
On Saturday, Coleman issued a statement claiming the voters he challenged were not registered to vote. All 519 applications came from overseas voters.
“The counties can decide how to proceed, however in Pennsylvania it is a felony to allow someone to vote who is not registered to vote,” Robert Arena, spokesperson for Coleman, wrote in an email. The 519 applications do not include any military voters, Arena said.
Under state law, individuals had until Friday at 5 p.m. to challenge mail-in ballot applications. Ballots from voters whose mail-in applications have been challenged must be sequestered until the county Board of Elections holds a hearing to adjudicate them.
The elections board must schedule that hearing no later than Friday, three days after voters go to the polls on Tuesday. Lancaster and Lehigh county election boards had not announced a date for their respective hearings as of Saturday.
The Chester County Board of Elections held such a hearing on Friday. A right-wing election denial group called PA Fair Elections challenged more than 200 mail-in voters based on postal service change-of-address records, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. The challenges all failed. The challenges cited information in the National Change of Address database that the county deemed inaccurate.
Diane Houser, a PA Fair Elections member, said at the hearing that the group had mounted such challenges across the state.
An unnamed representative of the group who declined to give their name disputed in an email that the group was behind any of the challenges across Pennsylvania. They said Houser alone challenged applications in Chester County.
At the conclusion of Friday’s hearing in Chester County, Commissioner Josh Maxwell said the evidence he heard described a statewide campaign by the group to send anonymous letters to legitimate voters, trying to convince them to cancel their mail-in ballot requests.
Among them, according to Maxwell, were family members of active-duty military service members, career law enforcement professionals, college students and people who left Pennsylvania temporarily to seek medical care.
"That is alarming to me, that someone would take such an approach to disenfranchise legitimate Pennsylvania voters, and I can't think of anything less American than that," Maxwell said.
The Chester County commissioners also dismissed challenges to mail-in voters on the grounds that the voters in question had not lived in the county for at least 90 days – a provision of Pennsylvania law that has been overridden by federal law and court rulings since at least 1972, according to Marian Schneider, an attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
Ruling on mail-in voter challenges
Taken with reports of mail-in ballot application challenges in other Pennsylvania counties, the potential effect is that a few thousand mail-in votes in a critical swing state could be invalidated or not counted for days.
If the margins for crucial races like president are tight, the required hearings next week by county election boards could draw international attention and leave the outcomes in limbo until as late as Friday.
Under state law, the hearings call for the county commissioners to act as a panel of judges. They must hear evidence and testimony from the challengers and the voters in question, and render a decision on each voter’s eligibility.
There’s also an appeals process that could delay the counting of affected mail-in ballots a few additional days. Parties can file an appeal to the elections board ruling within two days, and a county judge has to then schedule a hearing to review the decision, according to state law.
The 723 challenges in Lancaster appear to be unrelated to an investigation of dubious voter registration applications submitted to the office before the Oct. 21 deadline to register as a voter. That investigation is looking at 2,500 registration applications.
Read more from our partners, LNP/LancasterOnline.
