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All of the more than 4,000 mail ballot challenges filed in Pennsylvania in the past two weeks have been withdrawn or dismissed. The resolution of the challenges means the voters’ ballots will be counted, barring any other disqualifications, such as signature or date issues.
“It’s encouraging that every one of those challenges has been dismissed or withdrawn,” said Al Schmidt, secretary of the commonwealth.
The challenges were submitted in many instances by right-wing activists associated with PA Fair Elections, a group led by Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania researcher whose data analysis methods have produced inaccurate or flawed conclusions in the past.
Two state senators, Cris Dush and Jarrett Coleman, submitted challenges in four counties, all of which were withdrawn. Neither responded to a request for comment Friday.
In all, there were challenges to the eligibility of thousands of mail voters filed in 15 counties across Pennsylvania by Nov. 1, the deadline for such objections.
“I don’t know whether this challenge is disingenuous or just misplaced,” Patrick Judge, one of 52 voters challenged in Lawrence County, said at a hearing Friday. He said that the challengers may have a point that the state’s voter rolls could be managed better, but that seeking to invalidate the votes of U.S. citizens who followed the rules as they stand now is not the way to raise that concern.
Judge’s ballot wasn’t rejected. Still, at the hearing he said the challenge didn’t feel very democratic. “I feel very disenfranchised right now, for what I am not sure,” Judge said.
Pennsylvania law requires that someone must be a resident of the state to be an eligible voter. It also established a process by which — for a fee of $10 — anyone can challenge a person’s application for a mail ballot on the grounds that the applicant is not qualified to vote.
The bulk of the challenges focused on overseas voters, who are permitted to cast ballots because of a 1986 federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. The law established that U.S. citizens and military personnel living overseas can still vote by absentee ballot in the state where they last lived, though if they have no immediate plans to move back they can participate only in elections for federal offices like president, not state and local races.
Many challengers claimed that they were not looking to contest the voters’ eligibility to vote, but rather the practice of not registering the voters before issuing them ballots. But the effect of the challenges, had they been successful, would have been to invalidate the voter’s ballots. County officials argued the challengers were misinterpreting the requirements of UOCAVA and state law, and how these two statutes interact.
Other challenges were based on a comparison of the voters’ addresses in the state’s mail ballot request file against addresses connected to the voters’ names in a U.S. Postal Service database. Experts and officials have criticized this method of comparison for its propensity to produce false matches or misconstrue why the person requested a change in their mailing address.
Over the past week, counties held hearings on the challenges, featuring questioning by county officials and testimony from the voters. They concluded either with officials dismissing the challenges or the challengers withdrawing them. In many cases, officials said there was a lack of evidence. Several challengers withdrew their challenges after Election Day.
The hearings also revealed who the challengers were. In at least seven counties, the person filing the challenge had attended PA Fair Elections meetings in the past or identified themselves as working with the group.
An unsigned statement from the group denied that the challenges were in any way coordinated or approved by them. Honey, the leader of the group, separately rejected any suggestion that the group was involved.
In Lycoming County, a challenge was filed by Karen DiSalvo of the Election Research Institute, another group led by Honey. DiSalvo previously denied that her challenges were filed in association with the group.
One of the challengers was Patricia Bleasdale, who has attended PA Fair Elections meetings and submitted 143 challenges in Delaware County based on change-of-address forms.
At a hearing Thursday, Bleasdale acknowledged that she hadn’t done the analysis herself and had gotten the information from an outside group, which she did not name.
Ashley Lunkenheimer, chair of the county board of elections, expressed frustration with Bleasdale’s actions.
“Do you understand what you’ve done here?” Lunkenheimer said. “We have 143 voters that we have notified that they may not have their mail-in ballots count in a really important election … You’ve done that with not actually having looked to see if each of them filed a national change-of-address form.”
Voters targeted by Bleasdale’s challenges testified as well. Nicholas Maston invited Bleasdale to visit his home 1.6 miles away from where the hearing was held to verify his residency. The filing against him cited a years-old change of address to a home in Chicago, but didn’t acknowledge a more recent record changing his address to his current Delaware County home in August.
The claim that his vote in Pennsylvania should be ineligible “is to me a very serious allegation, and that’s why I'm here today,” he said. “In addition to the assumptions that were made leading to this database and leading to these challenges being flawed, the data itself is flawed.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
