Pennsylvania election officials this week shot down claims of discrepancies with the vote count from the November election.
The claims were made by a group of 17 Republican state lawmakers who said they conducted an “extensive analysis” of election data. No Levittown-area Republican state lawmakers were involved.
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The lawmakers, in a statement released by State Rep. Frank Ryan, of Lebanon County, said they found “202,377 more votes cast than voters voting, together with the 31,547 over- and under-votes in the presidential race, adds up to an alarming discrepancy of 170,830 votes.”
The lawmakers indicated they used the state’s SURE (Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors) election system during their review.
Ryan questioned how the results could be certified.
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The lawmakers claims quickly spread across social media.
The certified election results for the presidential race had President-Elect Joe Biden ahead of President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in the state.
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The Pennsylvania Department of State responded by noting the SURE system’s vote count isn’t fully up-to-date, which means the lawmakers were using an incomplete dataset.
Wanda Murren, the communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said in a statement to LevittownNow.com that the statement from the GOP lawmakers was “obvious misinformation” based on “incomplete data.”
Zack Hoopes, an investigative reporter for Cumberland County newspaper The Sentinel, noted in a Twitter thread that it appears the lawmakers used voting data that is available for purchase through the state. He noted that the state website pointed out that the data is due to updated next week.
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State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who represents Adams, Franklin, Cumberland, and York counties, cited the alleged discrepancy in a letter sent this week to Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice.
In November, there were similar claims that Pennsylvania had a 1.1 million vote difference between the number of mail-in and absentee ballots requested and the number returned. The claim was debunked, according to Politifact.
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Many state Republican lawmakers have agreed to review the election and look at ways to propose changes, but the majority of Republicans have not gone along with calls to attempt to overturn the results.
The Pennsylvania Department of State has already begun a planned review the 2020 election and how it ran. This year saw new voting machines, implementation of voting changes approved with bipartisan support in 2019, and voting during a global pandemic.
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Trump and his campaign have claimed since the election they won the state despite receiving less votes. They also claimed there was widespread fraud but were unable to offer substantiated proof of it.
Statewide and in Bucks County, officials have said there was no fraud. So far, the November election has led to three voter fraud arrests in Pennsylvania.
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The three voter fraud cases:
- A Delaware County man has been accused of casting a mail-in ballot for Trump in the name of his deceased mother, which was caught by election officials and referred to law enforcement. The man also is accused of requesting a ballot in his deceased mother-in-law’s name, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- In Chester County, a man was accused of voting and then trying to vote again on election day a bit later while disguised as his son, according to the Daily Local.
- A man in Luzerne County was arrested in October for filling out an absentee ballot application for his deceased mother-in-law. The application was caught and sent to the local district attorney’s office for investigation, according to WNEP-TV.
Below is the Pennsylvania Department of State’s full response to the press release issued by the Republican state lawmakers:
In [Monday’s] release, Rep. Ryan and others rehash, with the same lack of evidence and the same absence of supporting documentation, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories regarding the November 3 election. State and federal judges have sifted through hundreds of pages of unsubstantiated and false allegations and found no evidence of fraud or illegal voting.
Now, the legislators have given us another perfect example of the dangers of uninformed, lay analysis combined with a basic lack of election administration knowledge.
For instance, it is quite common to have significant “undervotes” for down-ballot races in a presidential election, particularly when there isn’t a U.S. Senate race on the ballot. In 2000, Sen. Santorum received 200,000 more votes than President Bush, but the US Senate race still had more than 100,000 fewer votes than the presidential race.
We are unclear as to what data the legislators used for this most recent “analysis.” But the only way to determine the number of voters who voted in November from the SURE system is through the vote histories. At this time, there are still a few counties that have not completed uploading their vote histories to the SURE system. These counties, which include Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler and Cambria, would account for a significant number of voters. The numbers certified by the counties, not the uploading of voter histories into the SURE system, determines the ultimate certification of an election by the secretary.
This obvious misinformation put forth by Rep. Ryan and others is the hallmark of so many of the claims made about this year’s presidential election. When exposed to even the simplest examination, courts at every level have found these and similar conspiratorial claims to be wholly without basis.
To put it simply, this so-called analysis was based on incomplete data.
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