AMID CLAIMS OF UNEXPLAINED BALLOTS, PENNSYLVANIA OFFICIALS UNSURE HOW MANY VOTED IN 2020
The state of Pennsylvania is still uncertain just how many residents voted in the 2020 election, a state official revealed this week, amid allegations of discrepancies between ballots and voter rolls in the battleground state.
Pennsylvania is still uncertain just how many residents voted in the 2020 election, a state official revealed this week, amid allegations of discrepancies between ballots and voter rolls in the battleground state.
Pennsylvania was thrown back into the limelight this week when a group of Republican state representatives claimed to have found "troubling discrepancies between the numbers of total votes counted and total number of voters who voted" in the state last month.
"A comparison of official county election results to the total number of voters who voted on November 3, 2020 as recorded by the Department of State shows that 6,962,607 total ballots were reported as being cast," a press release announcing the findings said, "while DoS/SURE system records indicate that only 6,760,230 total voters actually voted."
SURE is Pennsylvania's Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, the state's voter registration database. That databank is run by the state's Bureau of Election Security and Technology, itself administered by the Department of State.
The Pennsylvania State Department strongly disputed the representatives' allegations of mismatched vote totals, with spokeswoman Wanda Murren calling it "uninformed, lay analysis combined with a basic lack of election administration knowledge."
"This obvious misinformation put forth by [the representatives] is the hallmark of so many of the claims made about this year's presidential election," Murren continued, calling the allegations "wholly without basis."
Voter histories still incomplete for 2020
Multiple representatives who signed onto the analysis would not comment on its conclusions, pointing Just the News toward Rep. Frank Ryan, who appeared to have spearheaded the initiative. Ryan did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But Murren in her statement and in interviews with Just the News revealed that, even as the year comes to a close nearly two months after the election itself, the state is still ultimately not in possession of the exact number of voters who cast a ballot in Pennsylvania this year.
In her statement disputing the findings of Ryan and the other representatives, Murren said: "We are unclear as to what data the legislators used for this most recent 'analysis'. But the only way to determine the number of voters who voted in November from the SURE system is through the vote histories."
"At this time," she continued, "there are still a few counties that have not completed uploading their vote histories to the SURE system. These counties, which include Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler and Cambria, would account for a significant number of voters."
In email and phone interviews with Just the News, Murren confirmed that voting histories "are each tied to an individual voter" and that those histories are "the only way to determine exactly how many voters voted in the election."
Asked to clarify how the Department of State certified the election without apparently knowing how many voters ultimately voted in the election, Murren replied: "Each county certifies the vote totals for each individual candidate. The secretary's certification is based on the certifications from each county. In Pennsylvania, it is the counties that are authorized to administer all aspects of elections — from voter registration to canvassing the ballots."
Murren pointed to the Department of State's website, which lists just under seven million ballots cast in the election this year.
That figure is reflective of "the number of votes cast for each candidate," she said. "Those numbers come from the scanners. And those scanners are totally anonymous. It's just the votes cast for individual candidates."
"What the counties are doing now," she continued, "is strictly administrative. They are now going back and telling our database which voters voted."
"We don't know which candidates they voted for," she added of the administrative lists, as "those counts are already established" in the scanner tallies.
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/nearly-two-months-after-election-pennsylvania-still-uncertain-how-many