Report From Pennsylvania: Part Four

This is part four of George Parry’s assessment of the 2024 election in Pennsylvania. Find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

The Pennsylvania Department of State reports that, as of Nov. 4, 2024, 997,540 mail-in ballots have been returned by registered Democrats, 587,546 by registered Republicans, and 205,323 by “Others.” As previously discussed in this series, these numbers will change since mail-in ballots will be accepted up until 8 p.m. on Election Day. 

But at present, the Democrat mail-in ballot advantage is 409,994 over Republicans.

Each Pennsylvania county has a board of elections that, among other things, handles voter registration and the issuance of mail-in ballots. Anyone wishing to vote by mail must submit a signed and dated mail-in ballot request form to the board of elections of the county in which the applicant resides. The application includes the name and address of the applicant, identifying numbers from, among others, a Pennsylvania driver’s license or the last four digits of a Social Security number.  

Once the application is processed, the county board of elections issues the mail-in ballot.

A similar process exists for voter registration. (In addition, so-called “motor-voter” registrations through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation are also vetted by the county boards.)

So it is that the county board of elections is the first line of defense when it comes to detecting fraudulent applications for both voter registrations as well as mail-in ballots.

Last week the Lancaster County Board of Elections flagged approximately 2,600 suspicious voter registration/mail-in ballot request forms and referred the matter to Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams.

According to Adams, many applications “appeared to have the same handwriting, were filled out on the same day with unknown signatures, and some were previously registered voters, and the signatures on file did not match the signatures on the application.” Lancaster County detectives have found false addresses, false personal information, mismatched Social Security numbers, and other issues.

In cases where much of the information was accurate, detectives spoke to the applicants named in the suspicious voter registration applications and found that they had neither completed nor signed the forms.

“At this point,” Adams said, “It is believed that the fraudulent voter registrations are connected to a large scale canvassing operation for voter registrations that date back to June.”

“We have confirmed violations of our Crimes Code as well as our Election Code. We have all available detectives working on this. We are all hands on deck so that we can properly assess the validity of these applications in a timely manner,” she said.

As of last week, at least 60 percent of the forms were determined to be fraudulent.

This turned out to be the canary in the coal mine.

Since then, similar fraudulent voter registration/mail-in ballot request forms have been detected in York, Berks, Cambria, and Monroe counties. 

For example, following a regular review of voter registration/mail-in ballot request forms, the Monroe County Board of Elections identified approximately 30 “irregular” forms. These were referred to the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office, which has determined that, so far, “several” of them are “fraudulent as they were not authorized by the persons named as applicants.”

According to Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso, the forms in question were submitted by “Field+Media Corps,” a subsidiary of FieldCorps, an Arizona-based organization “working out of Lancaster County.”

Similarly, York County officials report that FieldCorps submitted many of the forms under investigation in that county. Those forms were submitted on behalf of “Everybody Votes,” a national nonprofit voter registration organization. 

Everybody Votes has issued a statement saying: “Our partners work diligently to ensure that all forms collected comply with all rules and regulations.”

But Salena Zito, the best and most reliable political reporter in Pennsylvania, reports on X that the “Monroe County District Attorney said that the fraudulent registration forms were traced to FieldCorps whose clients included Biden-Harris, [Democrat U.S. Senator] Mark Kelly and Arizona Democrats. Calls to the number listed went unreturned and the FieldCorps website was mysteriously taken down.”

Further to this point, Harmeet Dillon reports on X that FieldCorps has “been paid more than $2.9 million by Arizona Democrats alone so far this year, and hundreds of thousands by Mi Familia Vota, Democrats’ favorite vehicle for court challenges to tear down AZ voter protections!”

Back in Pennsylvania, officials at the state and local level point to their investigations as proof that “the system works,” the fraudulent applications have been segregated, and the election is safe and secure.

But they are missing the point or, more likely, whistling past the graveyard.

There are 67 counties in Pennsylvania. How many similar fraudulent applications have been submitted to boards of election in those counties that have either failed to detect the fraud or simply looked the other way because it served their political purposes to do so?

I’m talking about you, Philadelphia, and every other similarly disposed Democrat county in Pennsylvania.

In short, how many fraudulent voters and mail-in ballots are already in the system and how many more are on the way?

 We don’t know. It could be enough to flip the outcome of the election. And that’s a critical point of uncertainty to keep in mind as you ponder the polls and prognostications as Election Day approaches. 

Now, Pennsylvania law allows a voter to apply for and cast a mail-in or absentee ballot all at the same time. Such an “on-demand ballot” process is done in person at the election office. 

The deadline by which county election sites must receive such on-demand ballots was 5 p.m. on Oct. 29, 2024 (last Tuesday). Needless to say, this process is more cumbersome and takes more time than the act of voting in person on Election Day.

As the Tuesday deadline approached, long lines of on-demand voters formed at the Bucks County administration building in Doylestown and satellite offices in Levittown and Quakertown. (Bucks is one of the so-called “collar counties” around Philadelphia. The registration edge there recently flipped from Democrat to Republican.)

Despite voters waiting for hours, Bucks election officials closed down the lines around 1:45 p.m., well before the statutorily mandated 5 p.m. deadline. Hundreds of voters were turned away.

That evening, RNC Chair Michael Whatley appeared before a Trump rally in Allentown, and announced that the Trump campaign had “just filed a huge lawsuit against Bucks County for turning away our voters.”

“Democrat election officials are seeing our numbers,” he added. “They are seeing us breaking early vote records across Pennsylvania. They are terrified. And they want to stop our momentum.”

Nice speech. But the 587,546 Republican mail-in ballots returned so far are less than the 595,570 mail-in votes for Trump in 2020. While it’s true that the Republican tally will increase by Election Day and may exceed the 2020 total, as noted above, the current Democrat mail-in ballot advantage is 409,994. So the lowering of the 2020 Democrat 1.4 million mail-in ballot advantage is simply the result of Democrats not casting mail-in ballots. Which means, of course, that those one million “missing” Democrats who have yet to vote by mail may well turn out on Election Day.

In any event, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit alleging that election officials in Bucks County had turned away voters “without allowing the opportunity to even submit their applications”and “precluded them from voting by mail, as is their right under the Election Code.”

The court promptly extended the on-demand ballot deadline to 5 p.m. on Nov. 1, 2024. 

So that was a win for the Trump campaign. Well and good.

Meanwhile, in Allegheny County, waiting early voters witnessed non-English-speaking persons being escorted to the front of the line to cast their ballots. They were being guided by representatives from “Vote Today PA,” an organization purportedly funded by Working Families Power, which advocates for “economic fairness, racial justice, gender equity, climate sustainability.” The county explained in a statement that the voters had needed the assistance of translators.

So far, there have been no similar reports from elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

Finally, regarding Kamala Harris’ increasingly heated and unhinged warnings that, if elected, Donald Trump will turn America into a Hitlerian dictatorship, let me close with this brilliant observation by the Babylon Bee’s Kyle Mann: “Behind closed doors Trump often complained about how he got rejected from art school and was constantly threatening to annex Poland.”

That’s it for now.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor and retired trial lawyer. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net. 

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