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York approves more than 1,400 voter registrations submitted at deadline, refers others to District Attorney

Details from the county contradict misleading claims from Donald Trump and the PA Freedom Caucus.

  • Jordan Wilkie/WITF
People fill out mail-in ballots for the 2024 General Election in the United States at a Voters Services satellite office at the Chester County Government Services Center, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

People fill out mail-in ballots for the 2024 General Election in the United States at a Voters Services satellite office at the Chester County Government Services Center, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

York County’s Board of Elections on Wednesday released more information about a batch of voter registrations it received at the Oct. 21 deadline.

Counter to claims of “thousands” of problematic applications, the county said it approved nearly half (47%) of the 3,087 registration forms it received. The county is seeking additional information from applicants on about another 890 forms. 

The Board of Elections referred approximately 740 forms to the York County Office of District Attorney for “further analysis.” Of those, roughly 630 of them were found to be duplicates of voters already on the rolls.

Neither the York County commissioners nor the District Attorney has said that any of the forms are fraudulent, unlike the statements from the Lancaster County commissioners and District Attorney’s office. There, county detectives have so far identified “hundreds of fraudulent” voter registration applications among a batch of 2,500 dropped at the county elections office on or near the Oct. 21 deadline, District Attorney Heather Adams said in a statement Wednesday.

Receiving large batches of registration forms at the deadline is normal for a major election year, according to Jerry Feaser, the former Dauphin County elections director from 2013 – 2023. But normal doesn’t mean good. 

“These organizations that hold these applications for more than a week are really the ones that are disenfranchising the voters,” Feaser said. “It’s not election officials.”

The duplicate registrations could be a consequence of registration groups holding onto forms for too long, Feaser said. Would-be voters end up registering again by a different method. 

Many duplicates could also come from concerned would-be voters, said Jeff Greenburg, who led Mercer County’s elections department from 2007 – 2020 and is now with the good government group Committee of Seventy. 

He remembers a voter that submitted three or four registrations at the deadline just to make sure they were on the rolls. Greenburg said there could also be more sinister reasons for duplicate registrations, like trying to change information for established voters or just meeting a canvassing quota, but they are easy to catch. 

No matter the motive, sloppy registration drives create problems for elections officials and voters.

“For every application that we’ve touched and had to handle and had to process and had to investigate is that much time taken away from a legitimate voter who’s attempting to register or attempting to get a mail in or absentee ballot,” Feaser said. 

Similar problems felt around the state

As of Wednesday, prosecutors in Monroe and Cambria counties had acknowledged investigations into smaller numbers of applications. The Cambria County Board of Elections rejected 21 applications earlier his month due to suspicions of fraud, the Tribune-Democrat reported.

On Wednesday, Cambria County District Attorney Greg Neugebauer said in an email that he referred the matter to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. Brett Hambright, a spokesperson for the attorney general, confirmed the office accepted the referral.

A Tuesday statement from Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso on social media claimed an Arizona-based political canvassing firm was tied to about 30 potentially fraudulent voter registration applications that were flagged by Monroe election officials.

Mancuso said in his statement that the group, Field+Media Corps, was “working out of Lancaster County.”

In an email Wednesday, the CEO of Field+Media, Francisco Heredia, said no election officials from Pennsylvania have so far contacted the company.

“We would hope that if Field+Media Corps were the subject of any active investigation, that we would be proactively contacted by the appropriate officials. If we are contacted, we will work with local officials to help resolve any discrepancies to allow eligible people to vote,” he said.

Heredia confirmed the group worked in Lancaster County this year.

Field+Media, which was founded in 2017 and has worked with a long list of Democratic and liberal organizations, advertised canvassing positions in Pennsylvania and three other states earlier this year, but no other official outside Monroe County has named the firm as the source of the registration applications under review.

Fodder for generating distrust 

Former president Donald Trump continued to make false and misleading claims about voter registration forms received by Pennsylvania counties. 

At a rally in Allentown Tuesday night, Trump urged his supporters to return their mail-in ballots, “because they’ve already started cheating in Lancaster, they’ve cheated,” Trump said. “We caught them with 2,600 votes. Now we caught them cold.”

Counties are reviewing registration forms, not votes. People need to first register before they can cast ballots. The Department of State said counties catching and investigating the large number of improperly filled out forms shows the system works and that voting is secure. 

Trump’s rally statement follows social media posts on Truth Social and X, both misrepresenting the number of potentially fraudulent forms received, and a press conference at Mar-a-Lago where he said there were “bad spots” in Pennsylvania. 

The PA Freedom Caucus put out a statement Wednesday morning mirroring Trump’s language of “thousands of suspected fraudulent registrations,” far above the actual number. 

York County’s chief clerk, Gregory Monskie, declined to comment on misleading claims made by Trump or  local elected officials. 

State Rep. Dawn Keefer, a Republican who represents parts of York County and is chairwoman of the Freedom Caucus, did not respond to an inquiry of whether they would update their statement with accurate information. Neither did Trump’s campaign. 

Reporting contributed by Tom Lisi of LNP/LancasterOnline.

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