(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% 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.”
