Billionaire supporter of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, spread disinformation about the Pennsylvania election results on Wednesday on his social media platform X. Musk claimed that Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s campaign for reelection was trying to count the votes of non-citizens.
“The Democratic Party senate candidate in Pennsylvania is trying to change the outcome of the election by counting NON-CITIZEN votes, which is illegal,” he wrote.
Musk was responding to legal challenges involving provisional ballots, which voters can use on Election Day if their right to vote is questioned, and which aren’t counted until election officials later deem them legitimate.
Casey’s campaign has said there could be enough additional votes for him to change the outcome of the race between him and Republican Dave McCormick. McCormick was leading by nearly 30,000 votes as of Wednesday, and while the margin is tight enough to prompt a statewide recount, the Associated Press called the race in McCormick’s favor last week.
Donald Frederickson Jr., the solicitor for Lackawanna County, said that the issue of illegal aliens didn’t come up at recent Board of Elections hearings. “We did not have any discussion about illegal aliens trying to vote,” he said.
Instead, Frederickson said, what happens is that infrequent voters sometimes show up to vote despite having a lapsed registration. Voters who don’t vote in two presidential elections in a row over five years can be stricken from the voter rolls if they don’t respond to a warning notice, he said – but they don’t always realize their names have been removed when they arrive at the polls.
Voters can cast a provisional ballot in the hopes that elections officials will find their registration later. And the Casey campaign has been trying to find voters who might have been listed as unregistered by mistake, though such cases seem rare.
Out of the 206 voters who cast a provisional ballot without being registered in Lackawanna, the Casey campaign found 22 who it thought might be registered. But upon further inspection, only one was actually eligible to vote.
“The rest of them we rejected. And we are not going to count them,” Frederickson said.
The Casey campaign also asked how long ago they had lost their registration: Frederickson said none of the voters had been removed from the list within the 30-day window before the election, which might allow them to cast their ballot if they had recently moved. “These folks haven't been registered in years. And so of course, we did not count those,” he said.
In Allegheny County on Tuesday, the Casey campaign found another voter who had been incorrectly labeled as unregistered, while the board voted to reject all the other ballots cast by voters who weren’t registered. McCormick’s campaign did not object to including this vote.
Philip Hensley-Robin, the director of the voter advocacy nonprofit Common Cause Pennsylvania, said every Pennsylvania resident who believes they are registered can at least cast a provisional ballot. If they are not registered, their votes are not counted. But sometimes there is an error in the processing of a ballot application, or a mistake in the voter roll printed out for polling place officials to consult.
“It’s known to occur, but it’s rare,” Hensley-Robin said. Hensley-Robin said the problems that have come up wouldn’t be a problem if Pennsylvania had same-day voter registration because voters who are eligible could register on election day.
A spokesperson for McCormick’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. But a campaign official, Matt Gruda, said on Wednesday in a post on X that Casey’s campaign was engaged in “ILLEGAL challenges to allow ballots from UNREGISTERED voters. Casey and his team have lots of explaining to do.”
The post included what Gruda said was evidence of the effort: an excerpt from a letter Casey campaign’s campaign sent to Frederickson. However, the letter did not ask the county to accept ballots from unregistered voters. It said election officials “must assess” whether voters had only recently changed addresses, since state law allows voters to vote in their old precinct in such circumstances.
The letter also says that voter registrations could have been missed if they have multiple middle names, for example, or because their voter application wasn’t processed correctly.
“No one is trying to count votes from individuals who were not registered. This is categorically false,” said Adam Bonin, a lawyer hired by the Casey campaign. “This is a blatant attempt by the GOP to lie and distract from their efforts to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians by throwing out votes from registered voters.”
The McCormick campaign has countered that Casey is seeking to bypass the state’s voter database and establish new rules for verifying who is permitted to vote, with no basis for doing so. It has promised legal action.
The process of challenging provisional ballots is not unusual or illegal, Frederickson said, but it happens more frequently in presidential elections, when more infrequent voters show up. The last time he could remember similar challenges arising in Lackawanna County was during a close race for the mayor of Scranton in 2017.
At Thursday’s Lackawanna Board of Elections hearing, meanwhile, McCormick’s campaign challenged provisional ballots over other deficiencies.
Provisional ballots are supposed to be signed by the voter in two places, with the judge of elections and the minority inspector signing an affidavit as well. Lackawanna decided to allow the votes of provisional ballots that were missing an election official signature because the mistake wasn’t the voter’s fault. But the board voted to disallow provisional ballots that had only one voter signature instead of the required two. In Allegheny County, the Board of Elections voted to allow both kinds of ballots.
