“Lancaster County officials hold onto crucial details of investigation over ‘fraudulent’ voter registration applications”

LNP:

Thousands of voter registration applications submitted to the Lancaster County elections office are being reviewed because some of them may be fraudulent, District Attorney Heather Adams announced Friday.

At a news conference alongside the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners, Adams said problematic applications were detected by elections staff in two batches dropped at the office in the final days before the Monday registration deadline. Those two batches included 2,500 applications, some of them legitimate, officials said.

The county’s top prosecutor declined to provide other details, including any names of the alleged perpetrators and the number of suspicious or fraudulent applications.

“At this point, it is believed that the fraudulent voter registrations are connected to a large-scale canvassing operation for voter registrations,” Adams said.

County detectives are contacting people listed on the applications, Adams said.

Problems with voter registration applications were the only issue raised by the officials. No mail-in ballots or other aspects of the election were affected, and no incorrect applications made it through the state’s voter verification checks.

“I want to stress this: No eligible voter will be turned away,” Commissioner Ray D’Agostino said at the Friday news conference.

He said no specific political party was apparently targeted by the allegedly fraudulent applications, and he and the other commissioners praised county elections staff for spotting the potential problems and for working long hours to review them while also serving the big demand for mail-in ballots from voters….

Election law expert Rick Hasen said that, generally speaking, cases of voter registration fraud are nothing new.

“Usually it happens because canvassers are being paid to produce registrations, and sometimes they produce fake ones,” said Hasen, who runs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

The problem is usually caught, Hasen said.

“I’ve not seen a case where a fake registration has led to people actually voting in elections,” Hasen said. “It’s often like this, where fake forms come in and they are quickly discovered and rejected by election officials.”

Jeff Greenburg, senior adviser of election administration at the Philadelphia-based good government group Committee of Seventy, said Friday he couldn’t recall ever reporting a potentially fraudulent application to law enforcement as an elections director.

Greenburg, who headed the Mercer County elections office from 2007 to 2020, said voter registration drives included more mistakes on applications than individuals registering to vote. Most of the issues they found were from people simply failing to follow directions and fill out the entire application.

“I do hope the county goes after these folks, I think it’s important for people to know that when fraud is identified, that we are responding through legal and proper channels,” Greenburg said….

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