Due To Staffer Error, Dem-Controlled Pennsylvania Board Tosses 142 Ballots In Trump Stronghold
The Democrat-led Luzerne County Election Board voted Friday to reject 142 mail-in ballots from a Donald Trump-voting stronghold in Pennsylvania after staffers screwed up the ballot processing.
The votes came from the 119th Legislative District, a portion of Lucerne County. This year, Trump received 90,370 votes in Luzerne County, while Vice President Kamala Harris received 59,966 votes. Trump flipped the county red by double digits in 2016.
But his 20-point lead in 2024 isn’t as large as it could be because 142 ballots were disqualified because an election worker mixed them in with others. If the margin were tighter, these tossed ballots also could have affected the recount between Republican Senate candidate David McCormick and Democrat candidate Bob Casey.
Election workers were supposed to segregate thousands of mail-in ballots that arrived on Election Day because the county had sent roughly 7,000 new ballots out to voters after it discovered the original ballots had a spelling error. The ballots had to be segregated because “the board had intended to revisit the original ones and accept them if the voters never returned a new one,” according to Times Leader.
Only one ballot can be counted. Then an election worker made a mistake that made this original plan impossible. On Election Day 1,301 mail-in ballots were mistakenly opened and separated from their outer envelopes, according to Times Leader. The outer envelope includes identifying information about the voter.
The county determined that of the 1,301 ballots returned on Election Day, 1,159 came from voters who also submitted one of the reissued ballots that was accepted and counted, according to Times Leader. But the county says it was unable to determine whether 142 ballots that had been removed from their outer envelopes were cast by a voter who had also sent in a reissued ballot, so the county rejected them.
This means that, due to what election officials describe as sloppy clerical practices, 142 voters may have been disenfranchised.
Luzerne County has been the focus of election integrity activists, including the president-elect. The Washington Post reported before the election that Trump and his supporters “have homed in on allegations that local election administrators could be undermining the process and can’t be trusted.” Why should voters trust a county in which an election worker’s error could have resulted in 142 voters’ ballots being tossed?
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
