My colleague Tim Fernholz has been reporting from Bucks County Pennsylvania, where Republicans have been alleging that Democrats have been trying to rig the election through voter fraud.
Bucks County -- for which Doylestown is the county seat -- has seen a surprising increase in the number of absentee ballots, in part because of a voter turnout effort by Rep. Patrick Murphy's re-election campaign and the state party, which is worried about the impact of next year's redistricting. When Republicans began to raise ethical concerns about the campaign to provide voters with absentee ballots, the county election board, dominated by Republicans, read the increase as a sign of potential fraud and began challenging the ballots; they threw out 600, 82 percent of which were Democratic. After Yeager and I spoke, he returned to his law office to prepare a counter-challenge -- that the election board disenfranchised voters by targeting Democratic ballots.
My initial impression was that the Republican allegations were pretty alarming, but having taken a closer look, they're actually pretty convoluted, and this is starting to look like a pretty good example about how alarmism about voter fraud can disenfranchise eligible voters.
Here's the deal -- Republicans say they've uncovered evidence of "coordinated efforts to intimidate, confuse and mislead voters into improperly and unnecessarily applying for absentee ballots, as well as efforts to submit fraudulent absentee ballot applications." Their evidence is that a letter was sent to Democratic voters urging them to send absentee ballot applications to a nonexistent but official sounding "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office" that is actually a post office box registered to two Democratic operatives. The petition states that Democrats were trying to "mislead the letter's recipients into believing that their ability to vote could be jeopardized if those persons did not complete the absentee ballot application within the letter."
The "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office" thing is pretty fishy, but it's not clear what they did was illegal. “Third parties are permitted to submit absentee applications to our office,” explains Bucks County Board of Elections and Voter Registration Director Deena Dean. “If you walked in with your neighbor’s application, we would take it; if you walked in with your neighbor’s absentee ballot, we would not take it, and that’s the law.”
The letter provided by Republicans, clearly marked as being from a group associated with the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee, states that "if you wish to participate in this year's general election by mail, your application should be returned by Oct. 20 to guarantee your participation." That's true -- if you're eligible to vote by mail, you won't be able to vote on Election Day, and you haven't applied for an absentee ballot, your participation in the general election is in jeopardy! The language is inappropriately alarmist, but it's clear this is for someone who intends to vote absentee.
What's entirely unclear to me is how this will lead to someone casting a fraudulent ballot. The complaint has a list of instances in which people who didn't want to vote absentee were pestered by campaign workers asking them to register, but that isn't fraud either. The allegation here seems to be that because Democrats encouraged people to vote by absentee ballot, and a number of recent absentee ballot applications were thrown out, that some absentee ballot applications requested by people who aren't eligible to vote have been sent out and will be cast. But the GOP hasn't provided any evidence that anyone who applied for an absentee ballot isn't eligible, or that someone who isn't eligible received and cast a ballot. You have to be registered to vote absentee, and if it's your first time voting, you have to provide ID. The fact is, you can download an absentee ballot online if you want to.
There's another accusation in the complaint that is completely unfounded, namely that "the bogus letter seeks to trick voters into needlessly registering for absentee ballots and then, for reasons unknown, causes them to send those ballots to a post office box apparently controlled by the Democratic candidate for Congress."
Some conservative reporters have been repeating this accusation verbatim. Here's Thomas Shakely writing at National Review:
At the heart of the controversy is the unusual practice of a party not only soliciting absentee voters, but specifically directing that ballots be returned to the party — rather than directly to the board of elections.
While Democratic operative insist there was no wrongdoing, the mere fact that the ballots were directed to their private post office box before being received by the county raises a cloud of suspicion over the motive for receiving and holding the ballots.
In another post, Shakely writes, "At the heart of the controversy is the unusual practice of a party not only soliciting absentee voters, but specifically directing that ballots be returned to the party — rather than directly to the board of elections."
Well that would be astonishing if it were true, but it isn't. The letter directs that the absentee ballot applications be sent to the party, not the ballots themselves. An absentee ballot comes with a return envelope. It would take someone very confused to send the ballot to get a whole new envelope for the purpose of sending the ballot to an entirely different address. When I asked Dean about the discrepancy, she suggested Republicans had simply made a mistake. "It appears that they mistakenly put the word 'ballots' instead of 'applications,'” Dean said. And thus a wild rumor is born.
The only other possibility is that this accusation is based on the fact that the letter states that "when you receive your ballot in the mail, return it right away to make sure your vote counts." That's just good advice.
There is a vast amount of distance here between the evidence put forth and the scheme being alleged, and it's unclear to me how Democrats are supposed to benefit -- are they going to go to people's homes and make sure they vote the party line? Nevertheless, on the basis of this, Republicans are asking that the absentee ballots not be counted until the Board of Elections conducts an "investigation" of their allegations.
The Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office thing may be unethical or worse, but there's little evidence here of what Republicans are alleging -- a conspiracy to get fraudulent ballots counted.
