Pa. Secretary of State Schmidt says Lancaster County violated state law in turning away student voters

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt sent a letter to the Lancaster County Board of Elections claiming employees of the Republican-controlled board had broken state and federal law by denying voter registration requests and in-person mail ballot requests from college students.

County election officials had been improperly rejecting students’ voter registrations because they did not have a Pennsylvania driver’s license or were already registered in another state, according to the letter, dated Monday. In some cases, Schmidt wrote, county staff were leaving applications in pending status for long periods of time.

Though it is illegal to vote in two states, it is not illegal to be registered in two states, and college students have a right to vote in the state where they attend school. It is, however, illegal in Pennsylvania to deny people voter registration because they are registered elsewhere or because they do not have a Pennsylvania ID.

“The Department demands that you immediately investigate these matters and compel the elections office to properly adjudicate all registration applications in compliance with Pennsylvania law, as well as to reinstate all registrations which have been erroneously placed on hold,” Schmidt wrote.

Former President Donald Trump won Lancaster County in 2020 by 16 percentage points, and it remains an important place for Republicans to turn out voters, but Vice President Kamala Harris has sought to make inroads in growing parts of the red county.

Schmidt’s letter followed a letter from the ACLU urging the Lancaster County Board of Elections to follow the law and register students to vote, and a story from the local news outlet LNP/Lancaster Online that the county had not processed about 30% of applications submitted by Franklin and Marshall College students.

At least one student who was registered in both Connecticut and Pennsylvania had been sent away when he sought to request a mail ballot becauseof his two registrations, Schmidt’s letter alleged.

In a public meeting Tuesday, the Lancaster County commissioners argued that Schmidt’s letter was based on false information and that, while there had been disputes over that student’s ballot, all other applications were being processed as quickly as possible.

“The board of elections has a duty to investigate where someone should actually be registered, and the staff has that same duty,” said Joshua Parsons, commissioners chairman.

Parsons, a Republican, claimed that Schmidt and local journalists in Lancaster were baselessly attacking election staff — suggesting a conspiracy to undermine the election in a majority-Republican county.

“There’s no logical explanation for this kind of conduct in terms of simply administering the election,” he said.

Schmidt served as the lone Republican on the Philadelphia city commissioners during the 2020 election and has been outspoken in combating election misinformation.

In a statement Tuesday evening, a spokesperson for the Department of State said the letter was based on its independent review of voter registration application records in the state’s database.

“It is the Department’s understanding that the county elections office is working to process students’ voter registration applications as required by law, which was the ultimate goal,” the statement said. “To be clear, all applications provided to the county prior to Oct. 21 met the statutory deadline for voter registration, regardless of their processing status.”

This is not the first time the Department of State and Lancaster election officials have been at loggerheads. In 2022, Lancaster was one of three counties the Department of State sued after they refused to certify the primary election because of a dispute over whether to count undated mail ballots.