Over 200,000 more votes counted than ballots cast in Pennsylvania.
There were not more votes than voters in Pennsylvania
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www.theepochtimes.com
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The story’s suggestion — that “23,000 absentee ballots have impossible postal return dates and another 86,000 have such extraordinary return dates they raise serious questions” — appears to be based on a post from a pro-Trump media outlet called the Epoch Times.
Using a database from the Pennsylvania Department of State that shows the dates on which mail-in ballots were sent out to voters and the dates on which those ballots were returned, the story claims that more than 23,000 ballots were supposedly returned before they were sent out. It claims that an additional 86,000 ballots are suspect since they were returned either on the same day or the day after they were sent out.
But a Department of State spokeswoman told us in an email, “That data does not indicate fraud.” State law requires counties to provide voters with mail-in ballots at their election offices. So, a voter could go to the county election office, request a mail-in ballot, fill it out at the office and return it — all in one visit to the election office, the spokeswoman explained.
Similarly, voters could return mail-in ballots at in-person locations a day after picking up their ballots. So there’s nothing fraudulent about ballots that were returned on the same day they were issued or the day after.
As for the appearance that ballots were returned before they had been sent out, that’s due largely to an update of the system that feeds the database.
Over the summer, when counties exported voter data from the state system in order to send out requested ballots, the system filled in that date as the date on which the ballots were mailed, the spokeswoman explained. Since some counties were exporting a batch of data days or weeks before they sent out the ballots to voters, on Aug. 28 the state started offering an option for counties to amend the date in the system to reflect the actual date on which the ballots were mailed. This new option would also trigger an email to the voter with an alert that the requested ballot had been sent.
Many counties began using the updating option in October, which was then days or weeks after they had sent out the ballots, the spokeswoman said. This resulted in emails going out to voters who had already returned their ballots, causing confusion, and resetting the date in the system. Lehigh County, for example, posted a notice about the issue on Facebook on Oct. 20. Greene County responded to voters’ concerns through a radio announcement at the time, a county spokeswoman told us.
So, that discrepancy was a matter of data entry, not widespread fraud.
A list of bogus election fraud claims, cobbled together from dubious websites and failed lawsuits aimed at overturning President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, has spread widely online.
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