It’s bad enough to cry wrongly a warning about a nonexistent wolf, but when you wrongly warn that 240,000 wolves are on the loose, that’s a real howler.
Experienced conservative and Republican elections officials refuted a letter sent by 15 Republican state representatives in Pennsylvania on Thursday claiming that “counties have already mailed over 240,000 unverified ballots.”
The letter stemmed from “faulty assumptions, made by misinterpreting government data,” Linda Kerns, an elections lawyer who represents Republican candidates, voters, and parties, told me this afternoon. “There are so many well-meaning people out there, and I appreciate the passion from everybody, but I want to make sure we are all working for the goal of fair elections.”
The confusion stemmed from a specific code that appears next to voters’ names on export data. Legislators believed, in error, that the code signified the voters’ names or other required information could not be verified.
Republican elections experts have been double-checking, county by county, to make sure the system is working, and so far, they have consistently found that the specific, suspect tag next to voters’ names does not indicate a lack of verification.
Gregory Monskie, chief operations officer for York County, explained the reason for the confusion. If voters’ first contact with the system does not contain all the required information, the system codes (or “tags”) it as unverified. That tag remains in the system, though, even after subsequent verification. When the ballots to the now-supposedly verified voters are sent out and returned, the system checks the verification again. So far, Monskie said, not a single one of more than 20,000 ballots actually submitted by voters has been flagged as unverified.
“We are working to get transparency and accountability,” said Kerns, the Republican-affiliated lawyer. “I don’t want a voter to look at this report [about the 240,000 supposedly unverified ballots] and assume that their vote is going to be diluted or not count because every vote really does count.”
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Despite all of former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, plenty of honest Republican election lawyers are willing to separate real concerns from spurious ones. Even if voting irregularities were nowhere near plentiful enough to change the 2020 outcome, though, voting irregularities are far more numerous than the establishment media will admit. Good Republican lawyers know it is important to maintain credibility about the latter reality by quickly and openly shooting down false accusations, even if those accusations are based on honest misinterpretations of sometimes complicated systems.
As multiple news outlets are reporting about the Pennsylvania legislators’ mistaken claims, it is important to set the record straight as soon as possible. It’s time to put this dispute to bed and move on to whatever controversy pops up next.
