A Chester County, PA judge yesterday dismissed the precinct recount petitions some voters had filed.
The judge doesn’t hold back in tearing up the attempt at getting hand recounts to “audit” the election.
Some of the voters who filed recount petitions are poll workers. They signed off on the results — and that the law was filed.
“In short, they now claim they themselves acted fraudulently or in error. Aside from the obvious question, ‘Were you lying then or are you lying now’ …”
Judge: Just because people believe there was fraud doesn’t mean there was fraud.
Counties are able to help voters cure flawed ballots this election.
The RNC lost an attempt to block counties from curing, and the PA Supreme Court deadlocked on the appeal, automatically affirming that ruling. Ballot curing doesn’t defy the court.
The city commissioners are posting the lists as part of their ballot-curing efforts to help voters get their ballots counted if they were submitted with flaws.
Campaigns, parties, organizers, and just anyone who wants to can take a look at those lists and try to help.
The lists of voters who submitted flawed ballots also provides us new data on ballot rejections.
Out of ≈105K received, 3,405 flawed ballots would be a rejection rate approaching 3%.
The PA Dept of State emailed counties an “URGENT survey” this morning about the number of undated and incorrectly dated mail ballots they’ve received.
But it’s raised alarm with some county officials because it asks for a partisan breakdown of those ballots.
The survey asks for the number of “undated Absentee & Mail-in Democratic Party ballots”, “Republican Party ballots“, and “Other Party ballots”.
It then repeats the questions for incorrectly dated ballots.
Some county elections officials I talked with said asking for totals is one thing, but asking for a partisan breakdown — which they assume means having to look up voter registration data — is inappropriate.
“The department has no rational reason to want to know this,” one said.
Last week, @RepGrove wrote a letter to the PA Dept of State arguing the state’s mail voting law, Act 77, is now nullified thanks to a provision that says if part of the law is overturned, the whole thing is.
He pointed to federal rulings over counting undated mail ballots.
Acting PA secretary of state today responded: No, Act 77 remains in effect.
“Your specious legal theory perpetuates disinformation. I ask that you carefully consider the way that you discuss these issues in the public sphere.”
Grove told me last week: We have to count undated mail ballots now → that’s not what the law says → law is voided.
Secretary Chapman: The court didn’t overturn law, it said the act of rejecting those ballots violates federal law. Challenge was to rejection, not the law itself.
With the PA recount results being officially released soon, a quick warning that it will be very easy to use the wrong numbers and make it look like the recount changed the vote count a lot more than it actually did.
(Even the Dept of State might do this.)
The recount is ordered based on unofficial results counties are required to report by 5 p.m. the Tuesday after election day.
Those results, after one week, cover the vast majority of votes — but not all, and the gap will be meaningful here.
Those will be the misleading numbers.
See, after those unofficial results, counties continued counting the last votes — primarily UOCAVA (military + overseas) votes, provisional ballots, some mail ballots that needed to be adjudicated. Ballots that were challenged had to be decided by the county elections boards.