October 30, 2024, presidential campaign news

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Election officials in Pennsylvania’s York County have declined more than 700 “questionable” voter registration applications and referred them to the district attorney’s office for investigation, the county’s election board said in a statement Wednesday.

The York County Board of Elections did not explicitly call any of these applications fraudulent, despite former President Donald Trump stoking fears on social media Tuesday about voter fraud in York County.

The county received a batch of 3,087 voter registration applications last week — of which about 24% (roughly 740 applications) were “declined and are undergoing further review by the York County Office of District Attorney,” the board’s statement read.

Of those declined applications, approximately 85% were duplicate registration requests, the board said.

Roughly 47% of the total applications were verified as legitimate, and roughly 29% of the applications had “incomplete information,” according to the statement.

For context: This comes after neighboring Lancaster County has also been in the spotlight over voter registration applications.

While Lancaster County officials said they were investigating suspected fraudulent voter registration applications from a batch of 2,500 dropped off by “large scale canvassing operation,” the county has not provided any details about the exact number of applications that might be illegitimate.

Confusion over voting tallies in Michigan was sparked because of a formatting error that has been corrected, with no extra votes counted, according to the Michigan secretary of state’s office.

The office was responding to viral claims that more ballots had been cast in Michigan’s early in-person voting period than identified voters in the state.

The claims appear to have originated from a post on X by Matthew DePerno, a former nominee for attorney general in Michigan who was charged in connection with efforts to illegally access and tamper with voting machines and has spread misinformation about election results in the past. DePerno has pleaded not guilty in the voting machines case.

In the post, DePerno said his review of Michigan’s Qualified Voter File — a voter records database that tracks ballot submissions — showed one voter ID had recorded a vote several times at various addresses. He added that the data showed over 160,000 excess ballots cast, which sparked a flurry of allegations on social media of widespread illegal votes in Michigan.

The Michigan secretary of state’s office attributed the confusion to a “formatting error” that has been corrected, which inadvertently appeared to show the same vote attributed to former addresses associated with an individual.

“Each of these voters only had one vote recorded for this election. This error in the data export process has been corrected and these erroneous extra lines no longer appear on the report.”

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump also attempted to clear up the allegations in a post on X, saying “it was a glitch in the system - these duplicates were not and WILL NOT BE COUNTED.”

When asked about the statements from Trump and the secretary of state’s office, DePerno told CNN: “If you believe this is an export issue then you are a moron.”

James Blair, the Trump campaign’s political director, said on X that they were in touch with DePerno’s team and “reviewing his observations and will take any action necessary after thorough review.”