Trump targets Pennsylvania in push to sow doubt about election
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Pennsylvania, likely the most crucial swing state in Tuesday's election, is at the center of former President Trump's ramped-up push to raise doubts about voting procedures and the election itself.
- "They've already started cheating!" Trump said at a rally in Allentown this week as election officials in Pennsylvania and several other states began scrambling to counter misleading and false information spreading on social media.
Why it matters: For months, Trump has been laying the groundwork for post-election challenges if he loses on Tuesday — and with early voting underway, the ex-president and his allies are making sweeping, unsubstantiated claims that Pennsylvania's vote is tainted.
Zoom in: "WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA??? Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!! WOW!!!" Trump posted on Truth Social this week.
- He also posted that Lancaster County, Pa., had been "caught" with 2,600 "fake ballots and forms, all written by the same person" — a message that seemed to suggest county workers were involved in election fraud.
- In fact, the opposite was true, Lancaster officials and law enforcement said: It was election workers who identified about 2,500 suspicious voting applications — not ballots — and the county was investigating them. Their election security system had worked, experts said.
- In York County, Pa., officials said they were reviewing about 3,000 voter registration applications. That led Trump to say the county had received "thousands of potentially fraudulent" materials.
- "Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scales rarely seen before," he said in a separate post.
Zoom out: Pennsylvania has long been a "hotbed" of election denial activities, making it particularly rife for misinformation, said Kyle Miller, a Pennsylvania policy strategist for the nonprofit Protect Democracy.
- Election experts say the investigations in the two Pennsylvania counties underscore their commitment to responding to any issues that come up.
- "The counties are doing the right thing in that they're investigating forms that were flagged. Again, these are not votes, these are not ballots," former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar said during a briefing.
- "This is a sign that the built-in safeguards in our voter registration process are working," said Al Schmidt, the current secretary of the commonwealth.
- Miller also warned that anyone looking to spread misinformation could point to the ongoing investigations to falsely claim that "the same thing could be happening [in other counties] — and we haven't heard anything there, so they're not looking for it, or they're abetting it."
The social media platform X also has emerged as a Petri dish of election misinformation, fueled in largely by the platform's owner, Trump ally Elon Musk.
- One video on X that has 3.3 million views was posted by Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley. It shows a woman being handcuffed at a voting center in Delaware County, Pa., this week.
- "This is voter suppression from the left," Whatley wrote.
- But the woman, Delaware County officials said, was removed for being "disruptive, belligerent, and attempting to influence voters waiting in line," in violation of voting rules.
Another video shows election officials closing a line in Bucks County, Pa., in the afternoon before the office's scheduled closing time of 5pm.
- The Trump campaign sued — and won — to extend the time period that voters can receive and return a mail ballot until Friday.
Between the lines: Pennsylvania does not have statewide in-person early voting. Instead it has early processing of mail-in-voting "over the counter" at election offices and satellite offices, which can create a lengthy and tedious early voting process.
- In Pennsylvania, "it's really 67 different elections being run at the same time in the different counties," he said. "That dis-uniformity leaves room for questions and doubt and misinformation."
The big picture: It's not just in Pennsylvania where Trump and his allies have been making false claims about the election process.
- In battleground Michigan, some conservative activists have pointed to a since-corrected "formatting error" on a voting report to raise questions about the state's ballot procedures.
The bottom line: "There's no such thing as a perfect election ... Humans, our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues run our elections ... nobody's perfect. There are always going to be errors," Boockvar said.
- "But what I think is most different this year is that the disinformation and conspiracy theories ... [have] just been spreading like wildfire."
Go deeper: Courts foiling GOP's late push for election changes
