More than 4,000 ballots from out-of-state voters challenged in Pennsylvania | US elections 2024

Mariam Larson lives in the Canadian province of British Columbia, but has been voting by mail in Pennsylvania for decades.

This year, as she usually does in federal elections, she requested an absentee ballot and returned it in late October.

Last Friday, she said she was stunned when she received a message from her local elections board saying her ballot was being challenged by a name she didn’t recognize. The challenge stated that she lived outside the country, was not a member of the military, and therefore was not registered to vote in Pennsylvania and could not cast a ballot. She could call or write to the elections office in Lycoming County in north-central Pennsylvania, or appear at a hearing on Nov. 8.

Larson is one of more than 4,000 out-of-state voters who had their ballots challenged in 14 Pennsylvania counties, a key battleground state, according to the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and reports from the news media Votebeat and LancasterOnline. .

“I was confused and trying to understand what the dispute was,” Larson said in an interview Sunday evening. “Then I looked into it more, trying to understand it, and I got a little scared, and then I got angry.

“There was a fear factor, there was some sort of implicit threat that I had done something wrong,” she said.

Pennsylvania law requires a person to be a resident of the state to vote. But the challenges are invalid, the ACLU says, because federal law allows U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections in the last place in the U.S. where they lived if they live abroad and are unsure whether to come to the U.S. will return. The ACLU said the challenges appear to be a massive effort done through a merge process.

In 2020, 26,952 Pennsylvania out-of-state voters successfully returned their ballots that had been counted.

“The appropriate course of action for any county that receives mass challenges from these federally qualified ‘overseas voters’ is to summarily dismiss the challenges as both procedurally and substantively deficient,” attorneys for the ACLU wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state . “Counties should formally dismiss or deny the challenges as soon as possible to minimize any delay or disruption to the hiring process,” attorneys for the ACLU wrote in a letter to all 67 counties in the state.

So far, officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Center and Lycoming County have all faced challenges, said Andy Hoover, a spokesman for the ACLU.

The person who filed Larson’s‘ challenging was Karen DiSalvo, an attorney with a group called the Election Research Institute. DiSalvo recently lost a federal lawsuit challenging the eligibility of foreign voters that a federal judge said was based on “phantom fear of foreign crimes.” The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a prominent activist who has spread false claims about elections.

Judges have rejected similar challenges to out-of-state voters in North Carolina and Michigan.

In Pennsylvania, voters can challenge other voters’ mail-in ballots. It’s not clear how Pennsylvania counties will deal with the challenges. Even if they are fired, they underscore how Donald Trump and his allies are already sowing doubt about the election. The ex-president wrongly suggested in September that votes cast by foreign voters were fraudulent.

Recent polls show Pennsylvania essentially tied, with its 19 electoral votes closely contested in both campaigns. Because the race is so close, both campaigns are fighting fiercely over rules that could affect whether certain mail-in votes count.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last week that the votes of voters who forget to write the date on their ballot will not be counted. Both the state Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court also recently ruled that voters who forget to put their ballot in a protective secrecy sleeve can cast a provisional ballot on Election Day.

In both cases, Republicans tried to prevent votes from being counted due to technical shortcomings.

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