‘I can’t think of anything less American’: Right-wing activists’ effort to nullify hundreds of Pa. votes met with skepticism
An organized effort is seeking to disenfranchise hundreds in Pennsylvania. A county election board was skeptical.
Married to an active-duty member of the U.S. Navy, Ana Harley has spent the last 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 an organized movement that has sought 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.
The campaign 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 activists behind it maintain those voters should be purged from local county rolls, experts have noted the database is notoriously prone to error and cannot 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 Diane Houser, a Chester County resident who told the board she was working with the group PA Fair Elections.
That organization, led by self-styled “election integrity” researcher Heather Honey, has fueled misinformation campaigns about Pennsylvania elections for years. But it later denied any ties to Houser’s effort, saying that she’d acted alone and had only participated in a “letter writing campaign” with the group this summer.
“No challenges were filed by PA Fair Elections, and no challenges were filed on behalf of PA Fair Elections,” the group said in a statement that did not identify its author.
Houser is also the lead plaintiff in a pending lawsuit in federal court in Harrisburg from the group United Sovereign Americans, seeking similar purges to the statewide voter rolls.
No matter who is behind the campaign, the activists’ efforts resulted in challenges to the eligibility of some 4,000 mail voters voters in 14 counties across the state, elections officials said. More than 190 await review in Bucks County and another 140 remain pending 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,” Houser told the Chester County elections’ board during its contentious meeting Friday. “If you’re living in Florida, you shouldn’t be voting here.”
But the grilling Houser endured from board members exposed deep flaws in the group’s methodology for flagging potential ineligible voters and the 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 had recently moved back to West Grove 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 by the voters whose ballots she had attempted to nullify — and after each objection, she sheepishly withdrew her request. She acknowledged she had not personally vetted the eligibility of any of them.
But when pressed by the board to identify who had, she demurred, refusing to give up a name.
Who sent the anonymous letters to voters? “Grassroots volunteers,” Houser said enigmatically.
Who had paid the $10 fee for each of the 212 challenges she’d filed?
“Donors,” Houser said.
And who had 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 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 had 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 post office 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, Maxwell, a Democrat, 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.”
The board summarily rejected every one of Houser’s requests in the end. Wagner, her lawyer, suggested that she and her organization could still appeal.
But Houser interrupted as the hearing neared its conclusion, whispering quietly, in an exchange caught on a hot microphone.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to appeal.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a statement from PA Fair Elections denying involvement in the challenges filed by Houser.