Elon Musk falsely claims Pa. Democrats are ‘doing crime.’ Here’s what’s actually happening.

Elon Musk posted to X, the platform he owns, that Pennsylvania Democrats are “openly doing crime now” by working to change the outcome of the U.S. Senate race by counting votes by noncitizens.

This isn’t true.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and there is no evidence of widespread voting by noncitizens in Pennsylvania, let alone that Democrats are working to count their votes in the state.

Musk’s post, in fact, responds to posts about the back-and-forth that has occurred as counties across the commonwealth process provisional ballots and the race.

Democrats have filed challenges against the rejection of some ballots. The process is entirely legal but has earned more scrutiny as the race between Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick heads into a recount.

McCormick was declared the winner by the Associated Press last week, but the race went into a recount under the state’s law because his margin of victory is less than half a percentage point.

Counties are still in the process of completing the initial count as they weigh which provisional ballots to accept.

Provisional ballots are a fail-safe measure provided to voters at polling place if it is not immediately clear that they are eligible to vote or that they have not already cast a mail ballot.

These ballots are among the last to be counted in an election because they take the most work. They must be individually reviewed by election workers to determine whether the ballot is valid and the voter is eligible. Political parties and candidates then have the opportunity to challenge election board decisions regarding whether or not the ballots will count.

Across several counties, Democrats have filed challenges to board decisions to reject ballots cast by voters who could not be found in the state’s voter registration system.

According to the Philadelphia city commissioners, several of those challenges in the city came as an attorney for State Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Philadelphia) argued the election board had incorrectly removed voters from the voter rolls for inactivity.

Philadelphia Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, said he did not see any challenges in Philadelphia that were aimed at counting noncitizen votes.

The Casey campaign lodged similar challenges in other counties. The campaign said the intent was to ensure that voters were not incorrectly rejected when they were actually registered voters.

In a Bucks County hearing Thursday, attorneys for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party disputed the county’s decision to reject more than 220 ballots from voters it had deemed to be unregistered.

Lawyer Dawn Burke told the county’s board of elections that research done by the party indicated that at least 217 of those voters were actually registered, though she could not say under questioning whether the party believed they were registered in Bucks County or elsewhere. She also flagged an additional five voters who had pending voter registration applications at the time they cast their provisional ballot.

But while Burke pushed the board to count all of those votes, the county’s commissioners ultimately voted to reject them while they further researched the party’s claims.

In a letter to Lackawanna County lodging the challenges, an attorney for the Casey campaign noted that York County had mistakenly rejected ballots of registered voters and discovered the error after a review. The issue in York, they argued, merited review in other counties.

Furthermore, the letter argued that ballots should be counted for voters whose registration applications were denied because a voter failed to enter ID numbers in their application or had missing or incomplete information in their application. The campaign also asked that county officials confirm that they properly complied with federal laws surrounding canceling voter registrations and had not incorrectly removed valid voters from the rolls.

“No one is trying to count votes from individuals who were not registered. This is categorically false. This is a blatant attempt by the GOP to lie and distract from their efforts to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians by throwing out votes from registered voters,” said Adam Bonin, an attorney working on behalf of the campaign.

But the move is unusual.

Bluestein said he couldn’t recall receiving challenges to rejections of unregistered voters in the past.

McCormick’s campaign has argued the challenges are unprecedented and represent an extreme effort to count the ballots of unqualified voters. A spokesperson for the campaign retweeted Musk’s post that falsely claimed Casey’s campaign was illegally acting to count noncitizen votes.

In a phone call with reporters Thursday, the campaign pledged to respond with litigation. Officials argued the Casey campaign was trying to circumvent the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system that tracks voter registration and voter activity in the state.

“We think this is totally an extreme argument, it’s very outside the mainstream. Everyone knows that boards of election and the SURE system are the arbiters of who is registered and who is not,” said James Fitzpatrick, an attorney for the campaign.

Pennsylvania state law is very clear that unregistered voters cannot cast a ballot. Boards of election would be highly unlikely to accept those votes. Republicans and Democrats would both be permitted to appeal the boards’ decisions in county Common Pleas Court.

Any decision by a court to allow counting of ballots cast by unregistered voters would constitute a massive upheaval of Pennsylvania election law.