UPDATE:The UPDATE: The PA Supreme court just ruled that the undated mail-in ballots must not be counted. There are those rushing to federal court for a stay. November 1, 2022.
We are guaranteed that there will be no winner nor results for the Senate and Governors race any time soon after November 8. We are picking up where we left off with the last primary election debacle in Pennsylvania. Thank our interim Secretary of State who has chosen once more to put her finger on the scale. There was a back and forth through the courts this year as to whether the Federal courts could intervene in State elections. In this case challenging at one point the State Supreme Court’s opinion.
There are two separate and outstanding issues:
- Are the ballots that are not dated on the outside envelope of mail in ballots to be counted. The PA law requires a date.
- What is to be done with the issue of the 240,000 unverified mail in ballots that were already sent out.
Question:
According to Chapman, over 1.2 million mail-in ballots have been requested across the state, and 43% – or 556,000, have been returned.
So does that mean that nearly 25% of mail-in ballots sent out were unverified? Zero Hedge Asks.
This is tough story to follow and I will try and give you a Cliff Note summary of the salient facts. I assure that you will be well rewarded with a truly “She Done It.” Let’s pluck a couple of headlines to start.
First:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania’s top-ranking state elections official said Tuesday a new U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding how rules for the state’s mail-in ballots had been applied in a county judge election doesn’t change her agency’s guidance about counting them.
Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman said county elections officials should count mail-in votes that arrive in exterior envelopes with inaccurate or nonexistent handwritten dates, despite a requirement in state law.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier Tuesday (October 11, 2022) had declared as moot a decision in May by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had said mail-in ballots without a required date on the return envelope had to be counted in a 2021 Pennsylvania judge race.
Chapman issued a statement saying the high court decision did not affect a separate, previous ruling by state Commonwealth Court in favor of counting ballots without properly dated exterior envelopes.
Got that? Never mind. We shall soldier on.
US Supreme Court reverses Pennsylvania mail-in voting law decision
Two weeks ago:
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated a decision that had said mail-in ballots without the date on the return envelope had to be counted in a 2021 Pennsylvania judge race.
From Post Millennial
“It’s really important for us to get accurate information about the election process in Pennsylvania,” Chapman said. “So voters and the public know that when there are delays in counting, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything nefarious happening. It’s just what the law is in Pennsylvania.”
According to Chapman, the delays would be attributed to poll workers not being able to pre-canvas, or count mail-in ballots prior to election day.
She also encouraged voters to go ahead and send in their ballots, contrary to Republican messaging which urged voters to hold onto their mail-in ballots and turn them in to their local board of elections on election day – which Chapman said could (somehow) cause voters to become disenfranchised.
On Monday, Pennsylvania acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman revealed that there will likely be delays in posting the results from the state’s midterm election. Got it.
Chapman detailed in a virtual news conference how the state would be handling vote counting in the upcoming election, and said that it would likely take several days to count and certify the votes, according to Lehigh Valley News.
From Zero Hedge:
Here we go again…
Just one day after 15 Pennsylvania House Republicans sent a letter to acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman demanding to know why 240,000 unverified ballots had been mailed out (“which, according to the law, must be set aside and not counted for the 2022 General Election unless the voter produces lD,” the lawmakers wrote), Source Zero Hedge Almost a quarter of a million ballots were mailed to Pennsylvania voters without verifying their identity, state lawmakers say in a letter seeking answers from the state’s top election official.
According to Chapman, over 1.2 million mail-in ballots have been requested across the state, and 43% – or 556,000, have been returned.
So does that mean that nearly 25% of mail-in ballots sent out were unverified?
“According to the data, as of Oct. 21, 2022, a staggering 240,000 ballots are ‘NOT VERIFIED,’” 15 Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives write Tuesday in the letter to acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman.
“That is an enormous number of ballots, which, according to the law, must be set aside and not counted for the 2022 General Election unless the voter produces lD,” the lawmakers write.
State Rep. Frank Ryan, a member of the House State Government Committee, led the letter. It cites data on unverified ballots for the Nov. 8 election produced by the Pennsylvania Department of State, which Chapman heads.
Ryan and the 14 other GOP lawmakers add:This will force the counties to, as one county election director described it, ‘go after the missing information’ to obtain proof of lD for the unverified ballots. What level of additional staffing is allocated for counties to attempt to contact and verify the identity of these quarter of a million of ballot recipients? Many of these unverified ballots are likely the result of transposition of numbers or letters but the purpose of the law is to ensure integrity. The law requires matching therefore all must be set aside and lD verified prior to being counted.
The state lawmakers’ letter says the problem stems from a 2018 directive from her office “instructing counties to register voters without verification of identity.”
Ryan told The Daily Signal that a 2019 state audit found that the secretary of the commonwealth’s office was uncooperative and had an unreliable system for keeping election records under its Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors system, or SURE.
…
The letter notes that during a Sept. 14 hearing by the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee, Ryan asked Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary for elections and commissions, to explain why the secretary’s office made so many requests to the Social Security Administration’s Help America Vote Verification system.
Source: Daily Signal
Chapman opines on her concerns:
Chapman took the opportunity to convey concerns she says stem from ‘misinformation’ – threats to interrupt voting and calls to delay the sending of mail-in ballots.While she didn’t detail a specific incident, Chapman said there have been reports of threats aimed at the voting process throughout the state. She promised that her office has worked to investigate any threat made toward a free and fair election.
“Since I’ve been in office in January, we have constantly met with the FBI and Homeland Security just to talk through what the current threat landscape is and tools that we can give our counties to make sure that they have physical security protection as well as cyber security protection,” she said. (Tools? Cyber security protection? No doubt Merritt Garland’s DOJ in protecting election processes.) Here
“So it’s been great to partner with both the federal and state law enforcement organizations. We are in constant communication with them and it’s a situation that we are monitoring,” Chapman added. –Lehigh Valley News
Now where are we? Here is the latest as I can determine. Updates will occur as found.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Sunday, Oct. 16, the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Republican Party of Pennsylvania and Republican voters filed a King’s Bench petition (a petition filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when petitioners seek immediate relief from the state’s highest court) against Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman (D) and all 67 county boards of elections challenging the ability of counties to count undated mail-in ballots (ballots that are timely cast and valid but missing a date on their outer return envelopes) and incorrectly dated mail-in ballots (ballots that are timely cast and valid but have an incorrect date on their outer return envelopes).
This lawsuit comes just days after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated (meaning voided) a decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that required Pennsylvania to count mail-in ballots that were previously rejected for lacking handwritten dates next to voters’ declaration signatures on the outer ballot envelopes.
Note:This is a return to the issue that we covered previously – does/did the Federal 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have the right to intercede in a state election process? Links to that story at the bottom of the post.
However, the Pennsylvania Department of State immediately clarified that this decision does not change the policy that undated mail-in ballots must be counted. In the guidance, the secretary noted that the “order from the U.S. Supreme Court…does not affect the prior decision of [the] Commonwealth Court in any way. It provides no justification for counties to exclude ballots based on a minor omission, and we expect that counties will continue to comply with their obligation to count all legal votes.” This statement is consistent with the Department of State’s latest mail-in ballot guidance.
(During the previous election, various counties were counting ballots various ways. No records of the envelopes were retained. Thus some ballots were counted and some were not)
Earlier posts:
May 23, 2022 — bunkerville
Section of posts:
Federal appeals court says undated Pa. mail ballots should be counted, a decision that breaks with state courts and could have immediate impact. So reads the headline. Earlier I reported of the problems with certain ballots unable to be read by machine.
The handwritten dates are required even though mail-in ballots are usually postmarked and routinely stamped when received by county elections offices.
The trailing candidate, Zac Cohen, lost a state lawsuit over the signature requirement earlier this year and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to take the appeal.
Five voters whose ballots were thrown out in that election, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, then filed a federal lawsuit. They lost at the district court level before the appeals judges overturned that decision on Friday.
Department of State spokeswoman Grace Griffaton said Friday the Pennsylvania elections agency planned to canvass counties to determine how many of those ballots inside envelopes without signatures have been tossed, and officials plan to issue fresh guidance based on the ruling. Source
….
Then what? Meanwhile there are tens of thousands of mail ballots yet to be counted though as I write this I cannot find any source as to the exact number. And the chain of custody?
Returning to our original problem that Bunker posted regarding Lancaster County PA: (2022 Primary)
A novel approach to correct this was to ask on the local Lancaster TV station for volunteers to come down and replace the ballots unreadable with new marked ballots made by volunteers. The chain of custody was meager as best after hours. There certain was no hurry in completing the process. Ballots were processed from 9 am to 6 pm and last I heard were completed for this county on Saturday. What happened to ballots the other hours is unknown and no one has asked.
The glitch will force election workers to hand-mark fresh ballots, a process expected to take several days. Officials in the county, the state’s sixth most populous, pledged that all the ballots will be counted eventually. But by whom? How about the local candidates where a few votes can make all the difference.
Here is how Lancaster is going.
Workers in Lancaster County have finished counting thousands of ballots that couldn’t be processed on Election Day because of a printing mistake.
Just a refresher: PA had Dominion last election (2020) when there were “machine cliches” – Wander over to the link below for the Pennsylvania details and more.
Mentioned during a Fox News interview by host Maria Bartiromo were Nadeam Elshami, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff who last year became a lobbyist for Dominion, and Richard Blum, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, who she said is a significant shareholder in the company.
…….
The company, which has about a third of the voting machine market, according to Bloomberg, has faced scrutiny in the past couple of days with voting problems reported in parts of Michigan and Georgia, although the company and local officials have discounted the idea that the software was to blame.
Dominion has customers in 28 states and Puerto Rico, including all of the battleground states where Trump and his allies are contesting and pinning their hopes on recounts after media outlets called the presidential race for Biden.
cut….(Again, this is PA) – :
Chris Varney, Judge of Elections says they were initially under the impression that it was a problem with all ballots, but then determined it was only a problem with Republican ballots. Varney says he was unaware of which specific precincts were dealing with the same issue, but that this same issue was happening in numerous locations across Fayette County.
The solution provided by Fayette County officials was to collect ballots from voters and store them in the back of voting machines — but not to scan any of them to ensure the process was handled in a fair manner.
We’ve heard different variations of this story ever since November 3, 2020, when voting machines seemed to switch votes from Republicans to Democrats. At the heart of the scandal during the big election were Dominion Voting Machines. Certainly they’re not at the heart of this particular voter “challenges” story as well, right?
The best of the swamp. Just GOP ballots wouldn’t you know? The old “coding error. And PA still has drop boxes..
The very very best of the swamp. Thanks for hanging in. We are not to question election results and Trump lost in Pennsylvania.
Bunks Bonus: 2020
BUNKERVILLE | God, Guns and Guts Comrades! 