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USPS finds 1,700 ballots in Pennsylvania mail facilities after sweep
The
U.S. Postal Service said about 1,700 ballots had been identified in
Pennsylvania at processing facilities during two sweeps Thursday and
were being delivered to election officials.
Pennsylvania Democrats Accused of Violating Election Rules, Offering Ballot Info to Party Operatives
Ryan Mills
Pennsylvania’s
Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they
authorized county election officials to provide information about
rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.
The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvania’s deputy elections secretary.
In
the email, Marks wrote that “county boards of elections should provide
information to party and candidate representatives during the
pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected”
so they could be offered a provisional ballot.
Democrats have
been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are
key to Joe Biden’s chances of overtaking President Donald Trump’s
dwindling lead in the state.
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Republicans
argue the direction from Marks violates the state’s election code,
which states “no person observing, attending or participating in a
pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any
pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.”
In the lawsuit,
filed Tuesday against Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar in part by two
Republican state house candidates, the Republicans note that Pennsylvania’s supreme court stated last month
that “unlike in-person voters, mail-in or absentee voters are not
provided any opportunity to cure perceived defects (to their ballot) in a
timely manner.”
But the Republicans argue that the opportunity to
cure perceived defects for ballots that overwhelmingly support
Democrats is exactly what Boockvar and Marks were allowing. Attempts to
reach Boockvar and Marks for comment on Thursday were unsuccessful.
At
least eight counties refused to accept Marks’ suggestion that they make
voters aware of rejected ballots because doing so violates the state’s
election code, according to the lawsuit.
The Monday night email is
just one of several pieces of guidance by Democratic election leaders
that Republicans say have been inconsistent and confusing.
Lawrence
Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP, said high-ranking state
Democrats are using their positions to stack the deck against
Republicans and President Donald Trump.
“They constantly are
changing the rules,” he said. “They have been applying different
standards, issuing guidances as they go, changing the rules as they go,
and making it difficult for us to be able to establish that there is one
clear, uniform standard of how to do this throughout the whole
commonwealth. That’s what we want.”
Pennsylvania Republican
leaders also have complained about inconsistent guidance to county
election directors about segregating and processing mail ballots that
arrive after Election Day.
Republicans are challenging a Pennsylvania supreme court ruling that allows for all mail-in ballots that arrive by 5 p.m. on Friday to be counted.
Just last year, the Pennsylvania legislature extended the deadline for mail-in ballots to be received from 5 p.m. on the Friday before Election Day to 8 p.m.
on Election Day, the time that polls close for in-person voting. The
state supreme court’s elected Democratic majority then further extended
the deadline to the Friday after Election Day, a change the legislature
had refused to make.
In the case of a dispute about when exactly a
ballot was postmarked, or if it wasn’t postmarked at all, the state
supreme court ruled that election officials are required to assume it
was sent in by Election Day rather than rejecting it, as done under
existing state law.
In early October, the U.S. Supreme Court
deadlocked on the case, but left open the possibility that the Court
could reconsider it.
Pennsylvania officials have urged county
election directors to keep late-arriving ballots segregated, but
Republicans have said the instructions have been confusing.
State
Senate majority leader Jake Corman said at a Wednesday press conference
that he believed the State Department has been “weaponized” and
influenced by partisan efforts to sway the vote, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
“All we want to do is have confidence in the result,” Corman said, according to the Post-Gazette.
“We’ll have winners and we’ll have losers, but it seems to be the
mission of the Democratic Party to cause confusion in this race.”
Boockvar responded that the state’s guidance has been clear.
“They
don’t like the late counting of ballots because they don’t like
anything that allows more eligible voters to be enfranchised,” she told
the paper.
Tabas worries that without clear guidance about how to
process late-arriving ballots, they could be co-mingled with ballots
received by Election Day. That could be a problem if the Supreme Court
rules that only ballots received by Election Day should count in the
final tally.
“There was no clear indication as to how, during that
processing, they could remain segregated so we could identify later
which ones came in late and are included in the total or not,” he said.
Winning
Pennsylvania is key for Trump to have any chance of holding the
presidency. He was ahead by about a half-million votes Wednesday, but
Biden has cut into his lead as more absentee ballots are counted.
Trump’s lead was down to about 100,000 votes on Thursday afternoon.
Tabas
said it’s not clear how many outstanding ballots have yet to be
canvassed and counted, and it’s not clear how many ballots actually did
arrive after Election Day.
He said he remains optimistic about
Trump’s chances in the Keystone State, even though many elections
experts are projecting that Biden will ultimately pull ahead.
Tabas
said Trump “has done very well throughout the state, and part of our
confidence and hope and optimism is, our statewide candidates are doing
very well.”
“We’ve had greater turnout than expected in our
strongholds on Election Day,” he said. “We’ve exceeded our expectations,
in some cases very dramatically. Right now we are just waiting to see
what is left to be counted and that the rules are being applied equally
and uniformly.”
In addition to the lawsuit over ballot counting
and the lawsuit over alleged violations of the state’s election code,
the Trump campaign also has said it filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania
because its poll watchers have not been actually able to observe ballot
counting.
During a press conference Wednesday in Philadelphia,
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, said poll observers are being
kept so far back that they are “never able to see the ballot itself,
never able to see if it was properly postmarked, properly addressed,
properly signed on the outside, all of the things that often lead to the
disqualification of ballots, or make it very easy to dump 50,000
totally fraudulent ballots because they’re not observed.”
“Not a
single Republican has been able to look at any one of these mail-in
ballots,” Giuliani said. “They could be from Mars as far as we’re
concerned, or they could be from the Democratic National Committee. Joe
Biden could have voted 50 times as far as we know, or 5,000 times.”
Aaron
Coleman, a 20-year-old progressive Democrat, won Tuesday's election to
represent Kansas' 37th District in the state House of Representatives.
Coleman's
campaign has ben plagued by scandal. In June, he admitted to spreading
revenge porn and harassing girls online when he was 14, and in July, he
made insensitive comments about the COVID-19 pandemic.
While
Coleman initially dropped out of the race after beating seven-term
incumbent Stan Frownfelter in an August primary, he decided two days
later to continue his campaign.
However, Coleman had by
then lost support of the state's Democratic Party, which scrambled to
find a replacement, which included backing a write-in campaign for
Frownfelter.
On Election Day, Coleman ran unopposed in
the Democratic stronghold district, winning 3,496 of the votes. More
than 2,000 write-in votes were cast, but it's unclear what names were
submitted.
The 20-year-old Democrat who earlier
admitted to circulating revenge porn and harassing girls online in
middle school has won a seat in the Kansas state House of
Representatives.
Aaron Coleman, a dishwasher and community college student, ran unopposed in Kansas' 37th District, which encompasses part of Kansas City.
Coleman won Tuesday's election with 3,496 votes, KSHB reported. More than 2,000 write-in votes were counted, but it's unclear what names were submitted.
In
June, Coleman admitted to allegations that he bullied and threatened
girls online when he was 14 years old, including calling one girl fat
and saying she should kill herself, and circulating a nude image of
another girl when she refused to send him more pictures, according to The New York Times.
In July, he was also widely criticized for making insensitive comments about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Kansas Reflector, Coleman mocked the death of former GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain -- who died of the coronavirus -- and said he would "giggle" if former state GOP Rep. John Whitmer caught the virus and died. Coleman later apologized for his comments.
Despite
the scandals, Coleman beat seven-term incumbent Stan Frownfelter, also a
Democrat, in the August primary, albeit by a narrow 14 votes.
Coleman apologized for the bullying and revenge porn in a statement to The Kansas City Star after winning the primary.
"I
made serious mistakes in middle school and I deeply regret and
apologize for them. I've grown up a great deal since then," Coleman
said.
Coleman actually dropped out
at one point after the primary, but continued with the campaign two
days later, saying the fact that he won even with his background was a
strong message from voters.
"They said that they did not vote for
me expecting that I was a perfect person," he said in a statement on
Twitter, according to The Hill. "They told me that all of us have sinned, and we all make mistakes."
"Voters
do not throw out a 7-term incumbent for a person like myself unless
they are deeply frustrated with their lack of representation and
demanding a change."
The state Democratic party scrambled to
present an alternative candidate, backing a write-in campaign for
Frownfelter, KSHB reported.
On Wednesday, Coleman tweeted: "Thank
you to all of my supporters. This campaign would not have been possible
without you. I promise to work hard to serve the residents of this
district."
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U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan was furious
Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service had defied his order to sweep
postal processing facilities in 15 states Tuesday to find missing
absentee ballots and deliver them on time. The USPS had said in a court
document that 300,000 ballots had been scanned into facilities but not
scanned out, suggesting they were misplaced.
Instead of complying
with Sullivan's order, the USPS kept to its own schedule, raising
concerns that tens of thousands of ballots would not be delivered in
time to be counted. "It just leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth for
the clock to run out — game's over — and then to find out there was no
compliance with a very important court order," Sullivan said. He suggested he would demand a deposition from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
Notably,
there were 81,000 untraced ballots spread across postal districts in
key swing states with a combined 151 electoral votes, The Washington Post reports,
though, according to its analysis, the missing ballots "are unlikely to
affect the outcome of the presidential race." In many cases, USPS said,
the ballots had been hand-sorted and delivered without an exit scan.
The USPS did not provide data to indicate how prevalent that practice
has been, though it did disclose that 7 percent of ballots in its
sorting facilities Tuesday were not delivered in time to be counted.
"Even
in a worst-case scenario where all potentially misplaced ballots in a
state are permanently lost, those ballots amount to just a fraction of
both current two-party vote margins and estimates of the number of
outstanding ballots yet to be tallied," the Post reports.
In Georgia, for instance, the maximum 6,624 missing votes represent
just 8 percent of the margin between President Trump and Democrat Joe
Biden.
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In other states, though, the number of missing ballots is larger
— more than 11,000 in Pennsylvania and 16,000 in Florida — and the
untraced absentee votes in Arizona make up 24 percent of the outstanding
margin between Biden and Trump, the Post reports.
Also, its analysis that "misplaced mail ballots will not be a
significant factor in final vote tallies" has the caveat that it might
be a factor if "the final presidential vote margins shrink to low three-
or four-digit numbers in the coming days." In some states, like Arizona and Georgia that's a distinct possibility.
USPS's handling of mail-in ballots was 'gross negligence': Fmr. USPS Board of Governors Chair
Former
USPS Board of Governors Chair David Fineman joins Yahoo Finance's
Kristin Myers to discuss the postal service's handling of mail-in
ballots.
“The assumption that there are unaccounted
ballots within the Postal Service network is inaccurate. These ballots
were delivered in advance of the election deadlines. We employed
extraordinary measures to deliver ballots directly to local boards of
elections." - USPS
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said about 1,700 ballots had
been identified in Pennsylvania at processing facilities during two
sweeps Thursday and were being delivered to election officials.
In
a court filing early Friday, USPS said 1,076 ballots, had been found at
the USPS Philadelphia Processing and Distribution Center. About 300
were found at the Pittsburgh processing center, 266 at a Lehigh Valley
facility and others found at other Pennsylvania processing centers.
Ballots
must be received by Friday evening in Pennsylvania in order to be
counted. The vote for the U.S. president remains extremely close and
Pennsylvania is one of the states that remains undecided.
About 500 ballots were also discovered in North Carolina during sweeps, USPS said on Friday.
U.S.
District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday had ordered twice daily
sweeps at USPS facilities serving states with extended ballot receipt
deadlines as votes were still being counted in U.S. election
battleground states.
Some states, including Nevada and North
Carolina, are counting ballots that are received after Election Day as
long as they were postmarked by Tuesday.
Lawyers said at a court hearing on Thursday that USPS had delivered about 150,000 ballots on Wednesday.
"The vast majority were destined for postmark states and would be delivered on-time under state election law," USPS said.
Sullivan
said the processing centers must perform morning sweeps and then
afternoon sweeps "to ensure that any identified local ballots can be
delivered that day."
Sullivan issued a separate order requiring
USPS to "coordinate with all local county Boards of Elections in North
Carolina or Pennsylvania" in order to deliver all ballots "before 5:00
PM local time in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" on Friday.
Ballots
were still being counted by election officials in battleground states
after polls closed Tuesday in one of the most unusual elections in U.S.
history because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic
candidate Joe Biden was cutting sharply into Republican President Donald
Trump's leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The former vice president
retained slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Robert Birsel)