Last update: Tues, Nov 10th 6:07am
Fact Checking
I'm probably not the right one to debunk complex statistical theories, so I'm attempting to track every claim made about PA here, along with what the "experts" are saying (and my own 2 cents).
Complex theories put forth by politicians and lawyers that can't be explained Like I'm Five set off my BS detector, but I'm obviously no stranger to election fraud in Pennsylvania.
Earlier this year:
PENNSYLVANIA'S LACK OF JUDICIAL AND ELECTORAL OVERSIGHT MAKE IT A PERFECT TARGET FOR ELECTION FRAUD, HACKING
JUDGE OF ELECTIONS DOMENICK J. DEMURO PLEADS GUILTY TO ELECTION TAMPERING CHARGES
For those of you just tuning in, this is a bad project of mine where I try and connect dots through Real Journalism and tags, to make it easier to discover patterns among different counties or individuals. I like to dig through articles on a topic and find the press release, find the whole speech, track down the original court documents, etc. I like to see things for myself and dislike vague lawyer/politician-style statements.
My writing sucks and probably has lots of grammatical errors, and I might not know what I'm talking about, most of the time even, but don't trust me - check the links.
Prior Voting Fraud Cases in Pennsylvania
Official "Unofficial Results" Site
Official Election Data Site
Claims
Claim: Pennsylvania will not count ballots received after 8pm on Election Day.
FALSE. These ballots are to be segregated and tallied separately. See next claim.
Related Claim: Counties are disobeying orders to segregate ballots that arrive after 8pm.
- USA Today: "The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, on behalf of Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, said in the memo that the secretary’s guidance to counties to segregate ballots was "unambiguous. There is no evidence that any county is disobeying that clear guidance to segregate these votes, and the Republican Party offers only speculation that certain unidentified counties may ignore that repeated guidance or that the Secretary will inconsistently change course," the memo said. As
of Saturday afternoon, 63 counties had confirmed their prior compliance with the guidance, including Allegheny and Philadelphia, according to the memo. The votes received after 8 p.m. on Election Day were being tallied separately, the memo said."
Claim: AT LEAST 21k Dead People on Pennsylvania Voter Rolls
"9,212 registrants have been dead for at least 5 years, at least 1,990 registrants have been dead for at least ten years, and at least 197 registrants have been dead for at least twenty years,"
Rudy links to a Breitbart article that links to a
lawsuit (Civ. No. 1:20-cv-1905) filed by Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). They're suing the Secretary of State for failing to maintain proper voter rolls.
AG Josh Shapiro is asking for proof.
In Shapiro's replies, someone who claims to be a retired PA election judge says that, basically, its mostly always been bedridden sick people who request absentee ballots, so obviously they double-check to make sure they haven't died. I've heard this before, a long time ago, but don't have a source yet.
Claim: Ballots have been received from 200+ year old voters
Status: half-true
What I can confirm right now is that, per the
Mail Ballot Request Data, the essential claim here
appears to be true: that ballots were not only requested, but
sent out and
returned for people with birth dates over a hundred or so years ago. I took this screen capture myself:
There are rows with blank values that prevented me from sorting nicely, so I dropped them. I'm not actually sure what the significance of a blank entry is, versus 01/01/1800. To me, that seems like a default date in a computer system when the value is empty or zero. (Another
interesting date is 12/31/1969, but perhaps not in this system.)
So how many of these ballots are there? Well, skipping over the ones with no DOB, there are fewer than 1,000 entries with 100+ year old people. I can't explain how someone would enter that intentionally - wouldn't you want your fake vote to count? That's just a dumb way to fake a vote, to me anyway.
There are a lot of the same birthdays too, which might be explained away with the
Birthday Paradox, which says that it takes fewer people than one might think to get two people in a room with the same birthday. At 367 people, the probability of two of them having the same birthday is 100%. However, with only 23 people in a room, there's about a 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday. So I'm not necessarily alarmed that a bunch of people have the same DOB.
I am curious about those 1800 dates, but I'm assuming they're typos for now, since 8 and 9 are right next to each other. If I'm right, 1,000 typos among 2.5 million rows yields an error rate of 0.00039, or 0.039%. That's less than one half of one tenth of one percent. I think can live with that, assuming the DOBs have been investigated and corrected.
If they are fraudulent, it smells more like operatives sending in obviously-fake ballots to get each other in trouble. Good people on both sides, I'm sure.
Claim: GOP observers had been barred from the rooms where the votes were being counted.
Status: False
Republican observers
were of course there, and one of Trump's attorneys admitted in court they had a "nonzero number of people in the room", resulting in their request to stop the count being denied. The linked WaPo article claims 12 GOP and 5 Democrats at one point on Friday afternoon.
Under sharp questioning from Judge Paul S. Diamond, however, they conceded that Trump in fact had “a nonzero number of people in the room,” leaving Diamond audibly exasperated.
“I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?” asked Diamond, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush. Denying Trump’s request, Diamond struck a deal for 60 observers from each party to be allowed inside.
Claim: GOP Observers were positioned so far away that they had to use binoculars
Status: True (but so were the Democratic observers)
Trump's campaign lawyers did win an order to move observers closer to the voting machines in Philly, though. In a legal brief, Trump's campaign said: “Standing at one end of a room the size of a football field, which coincidentally is about the size of the Philadelphia Convention Center, is a lot different than standing at one end of a room the size of an office," The use of binoculars was confirmed by a Democratic observer, and said that all poll watchers had been positioned about 30 feet away from the machines on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Claim: GOP sought to prevent voters from correcting ballot mistakes.
Status: True
In Northampton County, Judge Michael J. Koury Jr. said the GOP needed to prove why it would be injured if voters had a chance to correct their ballots. "As a result, its request for an injunction must fail", he concluded.
Ballot curing is exactly how government paperwork should work IMO - fix the small error, not resubmit the whole application (and fee!) over again.
Claim: Pennsylvania voters received ballots that were already filled out
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