While Republicans have long been expected to regain control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, control of the Senate is a toss-up. That said, in recent weeks, several elections have shifted in the Republicans’ favor, increasing the odds that the GOP will win control of the Senate.
Unless Democrats have some tricks up their sleeve.
One race that Democrats have long expected to win was Pennsylvania. But the polls have tightened in that race, and Republican Dr. Oz has taken the lead in recent polling. But this is no time to take any race for granted.
Earlier this month, we learned that the Pennsylvania State Department intends to defy the courts and count un-dated mail-in ballots, which have been deemed illegal. It should come as no surprise that the acting secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a Democrat named Leigh M. Chapman. She’s been serving in this position since January of this year, and Wikipedia also describes her as a “voting rights activist”.
And it looks like she has another trick up her sleeve. According to a report from The Epoch Times, the Pennsylvania Department of State has sent out at least 249,000 mail-in ballots to unverified voters for the 2022 general election “due to an odd process for verifying the identity of those requesting mail-in ballots where people vote first and verify their identification later.”
The report also notes that the Chapman-led Department of State “also recently changed directives for county election boards, creating procedural confusion” because it advises counties to register voters without verifying their identity first.
“The Directive to register voters without verification of identity, combined with the delivery of mail ballots without verification, creates conditions that shift the burden of verification from the Department of State’s automated matching system, to county election offices where resources are already scarce,” a recently released report from Verity Vote says.
According to the state-certified results, Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 out of the 6,835,903 ballots cast between Biden and Trump, which means that the 249,000+ unverified voters receiving ballots could sway the results of the upcoming election.
That said, an unverified voter isn’t necessarily fraudulent and could simply be caused by typos, like an incorrect driver’s license number or a misspelling. But these discrepancies are supposed to be resolved before the individual’s vote is counted, and the failure to resolve these before the election leaves the election vulnerable to potential fraud.
And, let’s face it, Pennsylvania is no stranger to election shenanigans. In 2020, 26 Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, citing “substantial irregularities and improprieties associated with mail-in balloting,” submitted a resolution to decertify their state’s election results.
The resolution noted, among other things, that “heavily Democrat counties permitted mail-in voters to cure ballot defects while heavily Republican counties followed the law and invalidated defective ballots” and that “in certain counties in the Commonwealth, watchers were not allowed to meaningfully observe the pre-canvassing and canvassing activities relating to absentee and mail-in ballots.” And “in other parts of the Commonwealth, watchers observed irregularities concerning the pre-canvassing and canvassing of absentee and mail-in ballots.”
It was alleged that Pennsylvania mailed out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots, yet the total number of mail-in votes counted in 2020 was 2,589,242. In January, a Pennsylvania court found that the state’s mail-in voting law, which had been in place since 2020, was unconstitutional.
Democrats desperately want to maintain their majority in the Senate, if for no other reason than to ensure that Biden can fill the courts with left-wing judges. It’s too late to do anything about the alleged irregularities that occurred in 2020, but something must be done about these latest shenanigans that could be part of an effort to keep the Democrats in the majority in the Senate.