‘I can’t think of anything less American’: Right-wing activists’ effort to nullify hundreds of Pa. votes met with skepticism

Married to an active duty member of the U.S. Navy, Ana Harley has spent the past 15 years moving around the country. But she’s always considered Chester County home.

Her driver’s license lists a county address. She pays taxes there. And — up until she recently received an anonymous letter linked to a mysterious P.O. box in Delaware — she’d planned to vote by mail in the county, too. Instead, the message, signed only “a friend from Pennsylvania,” urged her to cancel her voter registration, noting she and her husband also had a listed address outside the state.

“For a moment I questioned my status and then I remembered that I had, probably two weeks before, submitted my request for my mail-in ballot,” she said. “So I brushed it off as a cowardly attempt to try and cancel my voter registration.”

That missive was the work of a right-wing group that has moved to cancel the votes of hundreds of Pennsylvanians just days before the Nov. 5 election. And Harley, 38, was one of roughly a half dozen Chester County residents who showed up to a board of elections meeting Friday to defend their right to cast a ballot there.

» READ MORE: Activists are challenging the eligibility of hundreds of voters in Philly’s suburbs. Experts say the effort is legally baseless.

The organization — PA Fair Elections, led by Heather Honey, a self-styled “election integrity” researcher whose work has fueled misinformation campaigns about Pennsylvania elections for years — has targeted voters whose names appear in the U.S. Postal Service National Change of Address database, suggesting that at some point someone with their name filed to receive mail at an address different from where they are registered to vote.

But while the group’s activists maintain they should be purged from local voter rolls, experts have noted the database is notoriously prone to error and can’t be reliably used to determine whether someone is an eligible voter.

“It is alarming to me that someone would take such an approach to disenfranchise legitimate voters,” said Josh Maxwell, chair of the Chester County Board of Elections. “I can’t think of anything less American than that.”

Maxwell’s board rejected challenges to the eligibility of more than 200 county voters brought by a PA Fair Elections activist during its meeting Friday, the state deadline for challenging mail ballot applications. But more than 190 more await review in Bucks County. Activists filed similar challenges to 140 voters in Delaware County.

Counties have seven days to schedule and hold hearings on challenged applications — it’s likely several will wait until after Election Day.

“This was a statewide effort,” said Diane Houser, a PA Fair Elections member representing the organization during Friday’s contentious meeting in Chester County. “If you’re living in Florida, you shouldn’t be voting here.”

But the grilling she endured from board members exposed deep flaws in the group’s methodology for flagging potential ineligible voters and slipshod vetting it had employed to make its case.

Harley, for example, rightfully maintained her voter registration in Chester County under allowances provided by law to military members and their families.

Other voters the group challenged Friday included a couple who’d recently moved back to Westgrove after a stint living in California, a recent college graduate from Wayne currently away on a three-month trip abroad to Italy, and a 37-year-veteran of Chester County law enforcement who currently works in the district attorney’s office.

Eric Roe, a Republican member of the county’s three-person elections board, interrupted at one point during the proceedings to personally vouch for one of the targeted voters.

“This woman was a mother figure to me,” he said. “I have a mother, but if I had a second one it would be her. And I can tell you she still very much resides” at her listed address.

Again and again, Houser was confronted face-to-face by the voters whose ballots she’d attempted to nullify — and after each objection, she sheepishly withdrew her request. She acknowledged she hadn’t personally vetted the eligibility of any of them.

But when pressed by the board to identify who had, Houser demurred, refusing to give a name.

Who sent the anonymous letters to voters? “Grassroots volunteers,” she said enigmatically.

Who’d paid the $10 fee for each 212 challenges she’d filed?

“Donors,” Houser said.

And who’d prepared the list of names for her to challenge?

“Data guys,” she replied.

Eventually, Houser and her attorney Meaghan Wagner, acknowledged that at least some of the information had come from EagleAI NETwork, a database developed by right-wing activists to flag potentially suspect voter registrations in battleground states. Its use to vet voter rolls across the country has repeatedly been shown to be less accurate than those used by local officials and it has repeatedly flagged valid voters for removal.

The rest, they said, they’d run through open source, Internet-based background check tools referencing documents like LinkedIn profiles that appeared to belong to voters they believed had moved.

Some of the anonymous letters sent by the group — Maxwell, the board chair noted — included return addresses to a P.O. Box in Bellefonte, registered under the name Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

“Who monitors that box?” Maxwell demanded.

“I don’t want to say,” Houser hesitated, then responded: “It’s not Robert E. Lee.”

Eventually, the board chair gave up in exasperation.

“I have serious concerns that this is throwing spaghetti against the wall to try to get Chester County voters to cancel their voter registrations without evidence,” he said. “This is a very serious accusation you’re making against these people. You’re accusing them of breaking the law.”

In the end, the board summarily rejected every one of Houser’s requests. Wagner, her lawyer, suggested that she and her organization could still appeal.

But Houser interrupted, whispering quietly, in an exchange caught on a hot microphone.

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to appeal.”