By Alexandra Berzon
One by one, they testified under oath: a military spouse who moves every three years. A man just back from six months of traveling around the country. A graduate student temporarily away for school.
All were eligible voters who had cast a mail ballot in Chester County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, before Election Day. And they, along with more than 200 others, had their votes challenged by a single activist, who questioned whether they met residency requirements.
About 4,000 such ballot challenges were delivered to 14 election offices across the critical battleground state by Friday, the deadline. The challenges represent an escalation of a tactic that has been used increasingly since the 2020 election. Although thousands of voter registrations have been contested since then, the Pennsylvania cases could toss out votes already cast — a move election officials say they have rarely seen on this large a scale.
Many of the challenges were submitted by activists who have mobilized around Donald Trump’s falsehoods about rigged elections. Election officials warn that the challenges not only threaten to disenfranchise voters, but they also propel unnecessary skepticism about the integrity of the election.
“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Department of State said in a statement, adding that they were made in “bad faith,” appeared coordinated and were meant to “undermine the confidence in the Nov. 5 election.”
A leading activist in Pennsylvania disputed state officials’ characterization of the effort. Heather Honey, the activist, said the challenges “could not be in better faith.”
Contesting a voter’s eligibility has become a key tactic of the right-wing election denial movement that arose out of Trump’s attempts to hold power after his defeat in 2020. In Georgia, activists filed tens of thousands of challenges to voter registrations before the election, forcing election officials to investigate their claims. Activists have also challenged voter registrations in Michigan, Nevada and Ohio.
Election officials across the country have largely rejected these challenges. In most cases, the voters were either already tagged by election officials as having moved away or wrongly identified as ineligible.
In Chester County, the activist who submitted the ballot challenges, Diane Houser, withdrew some of them after voters showed up to dispute the claims. The county elections commission dismissed the rest.
Other counties in the state are scheduled to hold similar hearings this week, after Election Day, raising the prospect that they could be used to contest the results. Trump and his allies have signaled there will be an almost certain fight over election results, if he loses.
“Without a doubt, the point of this is to lay the groundwork for challenging election results a person is unhappy with,” said Hannah Fried, executive director of the voter advocacy organization All Voting Is Local. “There’s no there there.”
Some of the challenges were filed by participants in the national Election Integrity Network, a sprawling group of activists organized by Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer, according to a review of recordings of the group’s meetings. The network has encouraged activists to comb through voter rolls and create lists of voter registrations they deem suspicious.
Other challenges were filed by two Republican state senators, Jarrett Coleman and Cris Dush. The senators’ claims largely focused on overseas voters. Honey and other activists have targeted the state’s system for accepting those ballots, claiming that it is invalid. The Republican National Committee has filed two lawsuits on the issue. Courts have dismissed both.
In an interview, Dush, who backed Trump’s claims of fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020, said he considered the challenges part of larger efforts to root out fraud in this election.
“My intent is to just make sure that the only people who are voting are qualified electors and that nobody is getting access to their ballot and voting for them,” he said.
York County dismissed 354 challenges to overseas voters in a hearing Monday afternoon.
Activists have suggested they intend to keep up the effort. In North Carolina, residents can challenge absentee ballots for up to five days after the election. Activists have said they have already identified ballots to challenge.
In Chester County, Ana Harley, whose husband has been in the Navy for 15 years, said she was upset when she learned her ballot application had been challenged and she was being asked to confirm her residency.
“I’m here in person because I feel an obligation to speak out about these unsubstantiated allegations against me and others,” she told the Chester County Board of Commissioners on Friday.
Harley also expressed frustration with a letter she received as part of a campaign organized through Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a group headed by Honey and affiliated with the national network. The letter, one of many sent to people on the U.S. Postal Service’s change-of-address list, encouraged voters who have moved away to call the election department to cancel their registrations.
Josh Maxwell, the commission chair, slammed the letters as potentially disenfranchising voters and criticized the challenges from Houser.
“Should people have to make time on a Friday afternoon to Zoom into Chester County to make sure their ballots are counted?” he said.
Honey acknowledged that Pennsylvania Fair Elections promoted the letter-writing campaign, but said it had no role in the Chester County challenges. Houser testified that she used data from the group to help compile the challenges.
The hearing revealed the flaws and the risks when outside activists try to determine who is eligible to vote.
John Cheshire testified that he had lived in the state since the early 1970s but had decided to rent out his house for six months starting in January and travel around the country, with mail forwarded to a friend’s house in Texas. He had recently returned.
Todd Thatcher and his wife, Cindy, moved to California for a few years. But they had recently returned to be near a new grandchild and had registered locally again.
Nicholas Mignogna was at college in North Carolina and is now traveling abroad. His father, Mike, testified via Zoom on his behalf.
“We live in Tredyffrin Township — from the day he was born, my wife reminded me,” the elder Mignogna said.
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