Some of the elected officials powering election decisions in Pennsylvania are rabidly political, and it shows, as they attempt to manipulate election results in their favor.
As county election boards canvass votes and work on the mandatory recount of the Senate race between Democrat incumbent Bob Casey and the declared winner, Republican Dave McCormick, it is important to know that decisions such as which ballots should count or be thrown out are being made by people with a strong political bias about who wins.
As Breccan F. Thies reported this week for The Federalist, Bucks County, Pennsylvania made headlines this week when Democrat Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Casey donor, defied the law and voted to count ballots the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has instructed them not to count—mail ballots that have no date or the wrong date written on the exterior envelope.
“Precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws anytime they want,” Ellis-Marseglia said. “So for me, if I violate this law, it is because I want a court to pay attention to it, and there is nothing more important than counting votes and I’ll take it all the way.” She stopped there, at what seemed to be midsentence, and there was a 15-second pause.
While Ellis-Marseglia’s comments got attention because she was blatantly ignoring the law — and the advice of the county solicitor in the room — equal dishonor goes to Commissioner Robert Harvie Jr., who voted with her on everything.
“I respect deeply our law department and their advice, and also the position of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court,” Harvie said before voting against all that, and choosing to count the irregular ballots.
The three-member Board of Commissioners is also the Board of Elections, the norm in most Pennsylvania counties. Republican Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo was outvoted every time, which is common on Pennsylvania county commissioner boards. County boards are typically made up of two members from one party and one from the other, making for a steamroller voting block that usually gets its way.
The board’s Democrats ran for commissioner as a team in 2023, and Casey endorsed them. Now, their local election decisions are benefitting Casey’s close election.
Managing election results with a partisan angle was part of their agenda during their 2023 election bid. Harvie and Ellis-Marseglia said it in a social media post on X , warning that a Republican opponent “controlling” the election process in Bucks County would be “scary.”
During their Thursday meeting, the board also spent a lot of time discussing how to deal with 217 provisional ballots cast by unregistered voters whose names did not appear in the county’s poll books or the statewide computer system that lists all registered voters.
As I reported previously, Democrats want these illegal votes to count. McCormick’s attorneys said on a media call last week that counting votes of unregistered voters is against the law and has never happened in Pennsylvania before. Bucks County election workers previously rejected these ballots for being cast by unregistered voters, but the Democrat Party attended the meeting and requested them counted.
In 2022, Harvie promoted electronic poll books, calling those who opposed them “election deniers.” Now he doesn’t trust the information in those poll books and seriously considered counting the ballots of people not listed in them.
A Democrat representative argued Thursday to the Bucks County board that the party’s records show these voters were registered and their votes should count, although the representative could not tell if the voters were registered in Bucks County or just somewhere in Pennsylvania.
A Republican representative said there is a reason partisan lists are not used, and it would be impossible to know where the Democrats got the information for their list.
DiGirolamo moved to reject the request. Ellis-Marseglia and Harvie struggled to find a way to include those ballots in the count and ultimately rejected the Democrats’ request with a compromise. They directed Bucks election workers to go through the ballots again to see if mistakes were made. If any of the unregistered voters turn out to be registered, they will notify the Democrat and Republican parties.
Of course these Democrats wanted to count the ballots as their party wanted. Both are deeply engaged in Democrat politics.
The Harvie and Ellis-Marseglia campaigns donated $500 each ($1,000 total) to Casey’s campaign on March 28, 2024. The Bucks County Democrats gave Casey $500 on May 16, 2024, Federal Election Commission campaign finance records show.
Ellis-Marseglia has been pictured with President Joe Biden several times and Harvie sat down for a beer with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff while on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris, Harvie posted on X in September. Both have worked closely with Gov. Josh Shapiro according to social media posts.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
