President Donald Trump has used striking imagery from Pennsylvania to call into question the integrity of November’s election — from military ballots discarded in waste-paper baskets to “bad things” happening in Philadelphia’s county offices.
But the real threats to election integrity are less Machiavellian and blatantly partisan than they are logistical and procedural, advocates and officials said this week.
To Mr. Trump and those within his rhetorical reach, individual discrepancies and flaws in the electoral process add up to an attempted “Democrat assault on election integrity,” he said recently — an attempt to steal a second term from him on Nov. 3 by manipulating the newly instituted no-excuse mail voting system and restricting his supporters from watching over the process.
But the vast election apparatus in Pennsylvania is mostly fueled by civil servants and workers who have been administering their local elections for years and are trying their best to navigate a complex and changing system, and any attempt at fraud would have to be far-reaching and coordinated, voting rights advocates said — a possibility, sure, but one that hasn’t yet showed any signs of occurring in the swing state.
The people who run Pennsylvania’s elections are “our neighbors and our friends,” said David Thornburgh, president and CEO of the nonprofit government reform group Committee of Seventy.
“They are dedicated citizens serving us,” Mr. Thornburgh said, “and it’s a little hard to believe that the little old lady walking down the street with her dog is the one who’s diabolically planning to commit felonious fraud in this coming election.”
That hasn’t stopped the president from latching onto two specific incidents in Pennsylvania that he claims show nefarious activity and a threat to a fair election, and though — in one case — state officials admit that troublesome errors were made, there is no evidence to support that either incident was politically motivated or representative of widespread fraud.
The misstep happened in Luzerne County late last month, when federal investigators found that nine ballots were improperly opened by elections staff and discarded. Seven were cast for Mr. Trump. The president used the incident in the first presidential debate to allege that there are problems with ballots across the country.
State election officials sought to clarify the president’s allegations this week, saying that it wasn’t a case of intentional fraud but one of clerical error. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said mistakes were made, and that a temporary worker hired for the mail room wasn’t “sufficiently trained” to recognize that remote overseas ballots look different than traditional ballots. The worker was terminated, she said.
But Ms. Boockvar said that the error was caught and immediately reported, and that Luzerne officials asked for help with additional staff training. Jonathan Marks, deputy elections secretary, said the state has heard that voters — in some cases — returned the ballots in envelopes that didn’t clearly indicate that there were balloting materials inside.
“It sounds like it was confusion,” Mr. Marks said.
“It was bad that it happened, but they immediately dealt with it and have moved forward in all the right ways,” Ms. Boockvar added, saying that counties “[acting] with that kind of promptness and comprehensiveness is exactly what you’d want.”
Suzanne Almeida, interim executive director of the accessible voting advocacy group Common Cause Pennsylvania, said that it shouldn’t have happened and that election workers need the training and knowledge to process every single ballot, but that “what happened in Luzerne County was a very isolated and limited incident.”
“In Luzerne, my big concern is not so much making sure something like this doesn’t happen again — because I think something like this is unlikely to happen again — but making sure this is not used to tell a false story of widespread election malfeasance and shenanigans that taint our entire election system because that’s simply not what happened,” Ms. Almeida said. “It’s irresponsible to suggest otherwise.”
Mr. Trump also said on national television that poll watchers in Philadelphia this past week were barred from watching the opening day of early voting — which he deemed a “big problem,” adding that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
Ms. Boockvar called the president’s claim “completely inaccurate,” noting that there aren’t any credentialed poll workers yet who have the legal right to be present in county elections offices.
But Mr. Trump’s allegations mimic those that his campaign is making in federal court in Pittsburgh, where they’ve joined the Republican National Committee and local GOP Congressmen to challenge the residency requirement for poll workers, among other things. Under the election code, only county residents can serve as poll watchers — which, as the campaign describes them, “[ensure] the integrity of an election by flagging irregular ballots, malfunctioning voting machines and possible voter fraud, while also communicating with voters to help ensure voter turnout in correct locations.”
Ms. Almeida said voting rights groups have been locked in this fight over poll watchers for a long time, and that poll watchers — though they can’t communicate directly with voters — can challenge an individual’s eligibility to vote, “which can slow down the process and may ultimately result in eligible voters choosing not to vote or feeling threatened or intimidated in the process of voting.”
The residency requirement already has been upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and as it stands like in elections past, each party is allowed to appoint three poll workers per location, and each candidate gets two watchers per election district.
A large count
What they’ll be tasked with watching on Election Day, nonetheless, is a contest that could far exceed anyone’s best turnout guess. The state has approved 2.3 million applications for mail-in and absentee ballots, a number already nearing total turnout for the June primary — not including all in-person voting. Add into the mix the persistent threat of COVID-19 and a nation that could be awaiting results from Pennsylvania to decide the presidential race, and it’s a day that could illuminate problems in the system.
Mr. Trump has been warning that the count might take months.
“A week after Pennsylvania’s primary, half of the counties were still counting ballots and you’ll be counting them here because this is a much bigger version of all of that,” Mr. Trump said recently.
The president is correct that a week after the June election, some counties were still finishing their counts. But the executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania told the Associated Press that the issues that arose were not systemic or statewide. In Bucks, for example, some ballots were too large for machines and had to be trimmed by hand to be tabulated properly. In Lancaster, machine scanners couldn’t read some of the paper ballots because the print was too light, according to the outlet.
One warning about November — which won’t be known until the days after Election Day — is that the court-ordered three-day extension to the received-by deadline for mail-in ballots will hold enough votes past Nov. 3 to potentially flip the election, thus leading to uncertainty.
Ms. Boockvar said of the nearly 1.5 million ballots cast successfully in the primary, only 60,000 arrived in the three days following the election.
“In context, it’s not a large number,” Ms. Boockvar said. “The overwhelming majority of ballots tend to arrive in the last week before the deadline. I don’t expect that to change.”
But turnout likely will be far greater, and this is a state where Mr. Trump won by 44,000 votes four years ago.
The count would be done quicker, Ms. Boockvar said, if the state Legislature would pass a law allowing counties to pre-canvass ballots earlier. Now, they only can start processing at 7 a.m. on Election Day.
“It’s common sense to allow the counties to start pre-canvassing earlier and it will allow for a prompt counting and reporting of the vote,” Ms. Boockvar said, “and it should be completely non-controversial.”
Mr. Thornburgh said all 67 counties are unanimous in pleading for more time to canvass these ballots, and that he’s not ready to “let the Legislature off the hook on this one yet” because it could happen a week before the election and still be helpful.
The last day to register to vote is Oct. 19. The deadline to apply to vote by mail is Oct. 27. Mail ballots must be completed and put into two envelopes — first into the smaller secrecy envelope marked “Official Election Ballot,” then into the larger envelope, which is required to be signed.
To League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh spokeswoman Eileen Olmsted, it’s crucial to correct disinformation and urge confidence in the system that’s served so many for so many years. She said she’s found herself on neighborhood social media pages recently, reassuring people who think their votes won’t be counted.
“My argument is, look, our postal folks and our elections folks, these are civil servants,” Ms. Olmsted said. “These are people who do their job as best they can under very difficult conditions, and they are not going to lend themselves to committing fraud, and we have trusted them over the years — many years — to deliver our mail property and to run our elections.”
“Why should we suddenly stop trusting them?” she asked.
Julian Routh: jrouth@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1952, Twitter @julianrouth.
First Published: October 4, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: October 4, 2020, 11:29 a.m.
