Election officials in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, said they've found and halted hundreds of fraudulent voter registration applications from a batch of nearly 2,500 that were dropped off at the Board of Elections Office on or just before the voter registration deadline of Oct. 21.
Director of the Board of Elections Tyler Burns holds a test ballot Sept. 30, 2024 in Doylestown, ... [+]
Officials said at a press conference Friday that concerns about the applications were raised during the normal review process when staff found that many of them seemed to have been filled out with the same handwriting, with fraudulent addresses or with fake names that didn’t match Social Security information.
An investigation by the district attorney's office found that the fake applications were linked to one or two organizations that conducted registration drives in the county ahead of the deadline, according to LancasterOnline, but officials did not name the organizations or provide information on who funded the canvassing.
The staff is still working to determine the scale of the fraud, but officials said the county's voting system "is secure."
District Attorney Heather Adams said the fraud appeared to be an "'organized effort" and that 60% of the applications that have been reviewed contained fraudulent information, but did not say exactly how many of the 2,500 forms have been looked at.
Pennsylvania is considered to be the most crucial swing state in the deadlocked 2024 election, when voters in seven states will likely determine who will be the next president (the candidate who wins Pennsylvania is almost certain to win the presidency, multiple pollsters have predicted).
News of the fraudulent registration applications comes after a fake video circulated on social media purporting to show mail-in ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, being opened and destroyed; the local Board of Elections said the envelopes and materials in the video are not those used by the county.
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"Our Lancaster County Elections system is secure," officials promised Friday. "Our systems worked. We will continue to operate with the highest levels of veracity, integrity and transparency so that Lancaster County voters can be confident in our election."
Experts have expressed concern with the risk of fraud that comes with paid canvassing in elections, particularly those that pay canvassers by the signature (it’s unclear if that’s how the Pennsylvania voter registration drives in question operated). In 2017, a dozen employees of a voter mobilization group in Indiana were charged with submitting fake or fraudulent voter registration applications in order to meet quotas, and in 2009 a political advocacy group was charged with facilitating voter registration fraud in Nevada by illegally paying canvassers to sign up new voters. Some states have made it illegal to pay canvassers or signature gatherers by the number of people they reach. There is no law about the practice in Pennsylvania.
The latest polls show former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in a virtual tie for the presidency, with 47% of likely voters supporting each candidate, according to CNN. Pennsylvania is one of seven hotly contested swing states—along with Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada—and carries with it the most electoral votes of those states, at 19. It is possible for either candidate to win the presidency without winning Pennsylvania, but the path becomes much harder for either of them. Statistician Nate Silver estimates Harris has a more than 88% chance of winning the election if she wins Pennsylvania, while Trump’s odds of winning rise to more than 90% if he takes the state. Trump leads Harris by one point in Pennsylvania in a new poll out Thursday, and FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has Trump ahead by 0.3 points.