Activists’ ballot-application challenges fall apart
Local activists’ challenges to hundreds of mail-in ballot applications across the Philadelphia suburbs ended last week without having a single challenge upheld.
Last month, challengers alleged 212 applications in Chester County, 319 in Montgomery County, 191 in Bucks County, and 143 in Delaware County came from voters who either moved away or no longer appeared on Pennsylvania’s voter registry.
Broad + Liberty received the list of disputed voters before the activists delivered the objection letters — each with a $10 cash deposit attached, per state law — to county election bureaus beginning in late October.
Affirmation of the objections would have canceled the ballot requests of 514 Democrats, 221 Republicans, and 130 others. The numbers reflect the region’s Democratic leaning as well as Democrats’ greater tendency than Republicans to vote via absentee ballot.
The challengers’ project began unraveling when Chester County’s election board held a hearing in West Chester on Friday, November 1 where numerous voters arrived and others appeared via Zoom to prove their current Keystone State residency.
Some of the voters lived in Pennsylvania but attended college far away. Others had out-of-state jobs or military assignments. Republican County Commissioner Eric Roe even knew one of the contested voters, likening her to a “mother figure” and vouching for her application’s legitimacy.
Diane Houser, who made the Chester County challenges, said at the hearing she was working with PA Fair Elections, though that group denied involvement in that particular ballot-request dispute. Houser is involved in other election watchdog activities, notably as a plaintiff in litigation by the nonprofit United Sovereign Americans to effect what it considers needed revisions to the commonwealth’s voter registry.
In December 2019, then Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (D) issued a report on Pennsylvania’s voter record-keeping system, revealing 13,913 possibly duplicate voter registrations and 2,991 apparently deceased voters, among other errors.
PA Fair Elections, in the wake of its own failed objections to numerous individual voters’ eligibility, defended its work as a well-intentioned move to spur county election boards to act as a fiduciary and investigate dubious registrations.
“If someone goes to vote and their name isn’t in the poll book, they vote provisionally,” PA Fair Elections representative Heather Honey said to the Delaware Valley Journal, adding she received personal threats after issuing challenges. “The board reviews these ballots and decides whether or not they should be counted. In the same way, voters can be challenged on eligibility, whether for mail-in ballots or in-person voting.”
Faultfinders across Pennsylvania initiated 4,000 mail-in ballot objections this year and all were either withdrawn or rejected. Challengers included two state senators, Cris Dush (R-25-Cameron) and Jarrett Coleman (R-16-Lehigh), both of whom withdrew their objections.
The group focusing on southeastern-Pennsylvania ballots based many of their challenges on change-of-address records, which do not definitively show whether someone permanently relocated. The activists also used Google searches and LinkedIn profiles as well as data from the Eagle AI NETwork, a “list maintenance” tool that culls publicly available information for use by election watchdog activists.
The ballot-request challenges outside of Chester County saw no success either. Complications with Montgomery County’s objection process prevented the activist group from filing there. And last Wednesday morning, the challengers withdrew their Bucks County objections.
“We intended to have a hearing on these, but since they were withdrawn, there won’t be,” Jim O’Malley, Bucks County’s deputy communications director, told Broad + Liberty.
The final blow to the activists’ project came on Thursday, November 7, when Delaware County’s election board held its hearing on the objections made in that locale. Patricia L. Bleasdale, who issued the Delaware County challenges, addressed the board to expound on her assertions that the voters she named could not legally vote in the county.
She began her sworn testimony only after another election watchdog, Greg Stenstrom, was ordered removed for shouting out to dispute board Chair Ashley Lukenheimer’s description of the challenges as “disenfranchisement.”
“This is not disenfranchisement,” he said. When Election Board Solicitor J. Manly Parks warned him to keep quiet unless called on to speak, Stenstrom spoke up again, prompting Parks to declare, “That’s it; he goes — right now. Thank you.”
Several police surrounded Stenstrom to escort him out. After a two-minute squabble between him and the solicitor, he acquiesced.
Stenstrom is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia to preclude the counting of 3,013 provisional ballots in Delaware County. That could affect the final count in Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick’s recent win against incumbent Democrat Bob Casey. Stenstrom is also petitioning to end the county’s use of voting machines he alleges “were not properly tested, validated, or certified as required by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).”
After he left the room, Lukenheimer explained she didn’t assign a value judgment to the term “disenfranchisement” and added that ineligibility to vote would warrant that characterization.
Nevertheless, after Bleasdale attested to having done no firsthand research on the electors she challenged — relying on the work of others she would not name — Lukenheimer and her board colleague Scott Alberts concluded Bleasdale’s objections had no merit.
That conviction grew stronger based on written and teleconferenced testimony whereby dozens of people Bleasdale accused explained their situations. Some were Armed Forces members, others split their time between two homes, and others were college students. Letter-writers called the allegations a “disgrace” and “utterly ridiculous.”
While Bleasdale’s letter clearly expressed a belief that the voters were ineligible, she backpedaled in her remarks to the board, defending her action as merely a Good Samaritan’s nudge to ensure the county oversaw a clean election.
“My purpose here in bringing this challenge is not to cast aspersions on the voters or aspersions on the Board of Elections,” she said. “I am simply finding that there are questions in my mind about some of the [voter] records that I think bear just normal everyday verification. I don’t expect to find anything negative about them.”
Yet Lukenheimer reminded Bleasdale that she explicitly doubted in writing that the voters she named had the right to vote in Delaware County. The chairwoman also pointed out that a good-faith theory of error or fraud is necessary to mount a ballot-request objection.
“The only permissible ground for a challenge is that the mail-in ballot applicant is not a qualified elector,” she explained.
Forty-one minutes into the hearing, Bleasdale withdrew all but one of her 143 challenges, remaining bellicose in support of her effort but seeming to agree her conclusions lacked a sufficient basis for disenfranchisement. The challenge she pursued to the end concerned a voter who Bleasdale said was registered in New York City as well as Delaware County and voted in the former location in 2023. This, however, didn’t clinch the matter; Bleasdale couldn’t prove her contention, and it is not illegal to be registered in two states.
The board dismissed that outstanding objection. During the hearing, Lunkenheimer, Alberts, Parks, and Elections Director Jim Allen reproached Bleasdale for making unsubstantiated — and possibly malign — allegations. (Republican board member John McBlain did not attend due to a scheduling conflict.)
“This doesn’t seem like an honest attempt to help…,” Alberts said. “I’m not seeing a preponderance of evidence against any of these voters; I’m seeing a preponderance of evidence of what could be a malicious and knowing attempt to disenfranchise voters.”
Early in the meeting, Lukenheimer said those who make such an attempt could be referred to the district attorney for prosecution, though there was no obvious sign that the board would make such a referral in this case. But the chairwoman did excoriate Bleasdale.
“If you named me [as an ineligible voter], I would be… more than angry,” she said. “I would wonder exactly what Mr. Alberts did: What are you trying to do? Are you trying to disenfranchise me without evidence, and why? Why would you do that? You have no evidence here.”
Allen’s concluding oration seared the most hotly of all.
“Voting is an extension of the First Amendment,” he said. “And these objections are tantamount to standing in the schoolhouse door of the polling place and blocking the voters’ access to the polling place.”
Bradley Vasoli is a writer and media strategist in Pennsylvania. You can follow him on X at @BVasoli.
This story has been updated to include information about the federal appeal Stenstrom has filed, and several minor wording changes.
Great article. Seeking clarification:
1. In December 2019, then Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (D) issued a report on Pennsylvania’s voter record-keeping system, revealing 13,913 possibly duplicate voter registrations and 2,991 apparently deceased voters, among other errors.
2. After Delaware County’s election board forcibly removed Greg Stenstrom (who asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia to preclude the counting of 3,013 provisional ballots in Delaware County AND petitioning to end the county’s use of voting machines he alleges “were not properly tested, validated, or certified as required by the Help America Vote Act) they then used a dozen or so examples, and a useful stooge, Bleasdale, who attested to having done no firsthand research on the electors she challenged, to decide hundreds of others were probably okay? Did they examine any of Greg Stenstrom’s claims?
3. When the likes of Bucks Co. Ellis-Marseglia and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who defended Casey’s refusal to disavow the illegal ballots, are quoted saying wild things like there weren’t enough of illegal ballots tallied to “have an impact on this race at this point” and are quoting openly flouting the law, it is no wonder that people like Bleasdale are bewildered and trying to figure out what is exactly going on with the elections.
A few questions and observations from the Nov 7 Delco BOE meeting not noted in the above article:
1. Where was John McBlain? Why was this farce of a hearing conducted without the Republican minority member of the BOE present? If Mr. McBlain had a conflict, the hearing should have been re-scheduled for a time in which he could have been present. The BOE Chair announced that the nature of the hearing would be “quasi judicial” yet there was no judge presiding as would be expected at such a hearing. Was Patricia Bleasdale informed in advance that she would have to argue her case against 4 Democrats: Chair Ashley Lunkenheimer who kept interrupting her, Marxist Scott Alberts, BOE Solicitor J. Manly Parks, and Delco Election Director Jim Allen, and that there would be no Republican minority member present? Perhaps if Dr. Bleasdale had received advanced notice regarding the nature of the hearing, she would have sought representation by counsel. Mr. Stenstrom was ordered to leave the room after he rightfully objected to the BOE’s unfounded accusations of Bleasdale’s disenfranchisement of voters and to the inappropriateness of the hearing. Mr. Stenstrom spoke out of turn because Chair Lunkenheimer refused to allow him to object. After Stenstrom was removed, Bleasdale was pummelled by the Democrats on the BOE in a blatant act of intimidation.
2. Although Bleasdale seemed unable to press forward on her challenge and unwilling to reveal the sources of her information, she was excoriated by Scott Alberts and Chair Lunkenheimer for the procedure she followed in raising the challenge to begin with. However, despite the weakness of the challenge as presented, Bleasdale absolutely followed the correct procedure for challenging those she believed to be unqualified electors, and she was fully within her rights to make such a challenge.
3. At a subsequent meeting of the Delco Board of Elections, Mr. Stenstrom raised the issue of the SURE system, PA’s voter registration system, to be faulty in its inclusion of unqualified electors, who may have passed away or not longer live in Delco, an observation with which Director Allen has agreed. A registered voter is not the same thing as a qualified elector. Anyone can register to vote, but some which are registered in the SURE system have been shown to be unqualifed to vote in DELCO. That fact does not disenfranchise anybody. People can vote in the county and state in which they reside and unqualifed electors should not be casting ballots in a county in which they do not reside. By law, the county is not permitted to send mail-in ballots to unqualified electors. Mr. Stenstrom has simply asked the Delco BOE to affirm whether 3000+ registered voters are indeed qualified electors. The BOE has not been able or willing to make such an affirmation. Why not? Do they fear Mr. Stenstrom may be correct? Or do they fear a 5 year prison term for violation of federal law?
Having arrived at the BOE hearing soon after Greg Stenstrom was wrongfully removed, I can attest to the egregious conduct of the Board, Solicitor Parks, and Director Allen. The sum of their remarks was, “How dare you question or challenge anyone that’s on the voter rolls? If they’re on the rolls, it means we have done our job!”
Then why, Ms. Lunkenheimer, does PA Election Law provide in detail the process for challenging a registration in order to seek CLARIFICATION of the voter’s status?
The purpose of a challenge, as provided for by law, is to ensure that the bank of voter registrations ONLY includes qualified electors. A challenge is not to disenfranchise any legitimate voter, but to ensure that the vote, the “Consent of the governed,” is not diluted by unqualified votes.
It seems that the Board of Elections and too many others are assuming that simply filling out a voter registration form makes one a qualified elector/voter. Or perhaps they are intentionally conflating the issue…
Pat Bleasdale remained civil and respectful throughout the lengthy hearing. The same cannot be said for Lunkenheimer, Alberts, Parks, or Allen. I was reminded of the infamous historic Star Chamber proceedings. They repeatedly accused and threatened Mrs. Bleasdale, addressing her in a manner totally unbecoming public servants or fellow citizens.
Check out the links to the challenge hearing on Thursday, Nov. 7, and see for yourself. They’re available online at the Delco BOE site.
Pennsylvania’s state motto begins with “Virtue.” We surely need more of it.