Fraudulent voter registrations seized in Pennsylvania

Lancaster County Twitter account Lancaster County Twitter account

(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania election workers flagged 2,500 voter registrations dropped off Monday in Lancaster County for suspected fraud.

In a press conference Friday, elected officials and investigators with the attorney general’s office said 60 percent of the applications reviewed so far have been deemed illegitimate.

The registrations in question were delivered in two batches. Ray D’Agostino, vice chairman of the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, said workers noticed similar handwriting and signatures on stacks of applications. Law enforcement stepped in soon after.

District Attorney Heather Adams said some applications included pilfered personal information with falsified signatures. On others, voters were tied to inaccurate Social Security numbers, addresses and driver’s licenses.

Investigators suspect the batches are connected to a voter registration canvassing effort dating back to June. The earliest dates listed on the applications are Aug. 15. Two other counties may have received submissions from the same effort, Adams said, though she declined to identify them.

“Thankfully, we stopped part one,” she said. “Part two is whether or not anyone intended to turn that application then into a fraudulent vote. For all intents and purposes, that has been stopped because of the good work of those in the elections office and the investigators.”

No specific party was overrepresented in the batches. Sometimes, the applications were filed for address changes alone. More than 365,000 voters are registered in Lancaster County, 46,000 of whom have already turned in mail-in ballots.

“Anyone who tries part two potentially, we are going to find you,” D’Agostino said.

The news comes the same week that election workers faced scrutiny from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of State for waffling on applications from college students already registered in other states.

According to WGAL, commissioners dispelled the allegations on Tuesday, saying that a Franklin and Marshall student with a Connecticut driver’s license had questions about where he could legally vote.

In another instance, an election worker is accused of telling a voting campaign organizer that registrations in other states had to be canceled before Pennsylvania would approve new applications.

The latter is against the law, but officials said it didn’t happen.

During Friday’s news conference, Commission Chairman Josh Parsons again chastised the reports as “absurd” and praised workers for not “cutting corners on election security.”

He also had a message for Secretary of State Al Schmidt “and anyone else” concerned by the allegations.

“We are running what may be the largest, most complicated election in our lifetime and we do not have time for that kind of political nonsense,” he said. “The Department of State should be helping counties run this election, and frankly, it should be now putting out a warning to other counties about this suspected fraud operation that we have stopped, in case it is operating in other counties.

“In the absence of that, we will work to alert our colleagues across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania about what has occurred here and to be on the look out.”

Christen Smith follows Pennsylvania’s General Assembly for The Center Square. She is an award-winning reporter with more than a decade of experience covering state and national policy issues for niche publications and local newsrooms alike.

This article was republished with permission from The Center Square.

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3 thoughts on “Fraudulent voter registrations seized in Pennsylvania”

  1. 2,500 fraudulent voter registration applications are not “isolated incidents.” They should investigate to find the person or persons behind this and prosecute. Such shenanigans, even though thwarted, serve to undermine voter confidence in the system.

    1. Agreed. Now, figure out why every election season, every four and every two, massive amounts of out of state cars show up in Chester County. Or why we have transplants from Oregon and Washington, other blue contentious states which came into Chesco in mass, either this past summer, or these past years, purchased homes, and now have MANY a Harris sign on their lawns. Just a “temporary resident,” for the election? Then sell the house, pay back your Actblue loan, and move to another state to flip to blue, or whatever? Funny how these “oddities” started in the 2016 election cycle. The only other time you would see “some” out of state plates in previous 2016 years, was during the summer vacation season. Those were far and few. Calli, Oregon, NM, Wisc, MI, MASS, and Washington. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Not a coincidence.

  2. Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “Not only were these submitted in big batches, that’s red flag number one, clerks noticed that many of these 2,500 applications were in the same handwriting. That’s a red flag, of course. Then, as clerks were inputting some of the data to register the people, it didn’t match up, wrong birth dates, wrong social security numbers, etc. Now at this press conference, the DA said, of course, there’s now an investigation. This could be criminal, and they are saying that they believe it’s these paid canvassers that go out and do these things before an election that may be the responsible parties behind this. They’ve not identified any names. They did say that these phony registrations were both Democrats and Republicans. It did not appear to favor one party or the other.” The DA also said that there’s some evidence that there’s two other counties that are conducting similar investigations.
    Barkdoll said, “They did not name which counties they are. They also said among these 2,500 registrations, there are some in there that could be legitimate. They were working through that over the weekend. Again, I think you’re going to hear more about this story this week. One silver lining to this, as awful as the story is, one could argue the system worked. I mean, here’s all these phony applications. The voter registration office, to their credit, were immediately able to see that these were fraudulent. So no voter registration cards were issued to these people. But it certainly makes you wonder, how prevalent might this be happening in other areas?”
    Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM pointed out, “There may have been two registration organizations involved in this, and the fact that they didn’t name it, I find disturbing. I hope they will, because did they mention how far up on the chain did it go? Was this one rogue person who was trying to fill a quota? Should we be paying for registration to vote? Brings that into question, I believe. How did they know the two other counties were involved? How do they know other counties aren’t involved? Now there’s a social media post which I’m not going to give the details of, except to say they’re saying it might be traced to a woman who, in 2020 was a part of the running out of paper excuse for shutting down counting. So you kind of have to wonder a little bit about that. The Gateway Pundit made a point that there has been an investigation on GBI strategies, voter registration scandal, and it hit Michigan in 2020, that supposedly, then was started to be investigated, and then was turned over to the FBI, where it just seemed to have died. That organization was involved in 20 different states of voting. Also interesting that the Lancaster County Attorney blasted the DA, blasted the Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, saying that they didn’t do much to help them, assist them, or they just felt he was dropping the ball as he comes out on the Sunday shows and says, everything’s absolutely fine in Pennsylvania. They said missing signatures was the main reason. There’s something wrong with this.”

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