Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania Not Registered in State Data, Hundreds of Voters Say

Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania Not Registered in State Data, Hundreds of Voters Say
Mail-in ballots in their envelopes await processing at the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorders' mail-in ballot processing center in Pomona, California, on Oct. 28, 2020. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Petr Svab
11/17/2020
Updated:
11/18/2020

More than 400 Republican voters in Pennsylvania say they requested mail-in ballots and returned them to vote, but the state absentee voting data say the ballots weren’t returned, according to a fraud detection team that contacted the voters.

And more than 500 voters said they received mail-in ballots despite not requesting them, according to the team.

The team was put together by Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. The team analyzed the data and set up a call center to verify election inconsistencies in several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, where the Trump campaign is contesting the results.

Of the “many thousands” called, the team managed to reach 1,706 Pennsylvania registered Republican voters who, according to the state data, received mail-in ballots, Braynard said in a Nov. 16 series of tweets and later in an email to The Epoch Times.

Nearly a third of the voters (556) said they never requested the ballot.

Of the 1,137 who did request a ballot, nearly 40 percent (453) said they mailed the ballots back, but the state data show the ballots weren’t received or counted, Braynard said.

If the results are representative of the whole state, they could throw into question the election result.

Some 165,000 Pennsylvania Republicans were mailed ballots but weren’t marked as having returned them, Braynard said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden currently leads by fewer than 75,000 votes in the state, according to unofficial results.

Braynard said the team was able to obtain 30 written declarations from the voters, about half of them confirming they received a ballot despite not requesting one. The other half said they returned their ballot, even though the state data say their ballots weren’t returned.

“We have a small in-house team following up on the call center for this purpose,” Braynard said. “Unsurprisingly, when you start asking civilians to get involved in a political battle by signing a legal document, the number who want to go forward drops pretty quickly.”

The Pennsylvania Department of State didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump campaign is suing Pennsylvania in a federal court seeking an injunction that blocks the state from certifying the results of the 2020 general election, alleging that state election officials had “mismanaged the election process” and that Republican poll watchers were prevented from meaningfully observing the vote-counting process.

Braynard said he’s providing data to several different legal teams.

He said results of the same inquiry in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona will be released on Nov. 18.

He already announced that the team found 17,877 early or absentee voters in Georgia who had filed out-of-state move notices and thus potentially weren’t eligible to vote in the state. Biden currently leads the state by about 14,000 votes.

The team has also found out-of-state move notices conflicting with votes cast with 7,426 Pennsylvania voters, 6,254 Wisconsin voters, 5,145 Nevada voters, 5,084 Arizona voters, and 1,688 Michigan voters.

So far, according to Braynard, they’ve confirmed 631 double-voters in Pennsylvania and 987 in Nevada.