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Widespread theories about voter fraud spread on social media after the US elections and have been widely claimed by Donald Trump.
Mail-in ballots are processed at the Chester County Voter Services office in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Source: Associated Press
But claims that include deceased people’s identities used in Pennsylvania and people who use women’s maiden names without their knowledge to cast votes in other states are being questioned by election officials.
They say there is no evidence that the dead voted in Pennsylvania.
Election experts say false claims about dead voters come up in every election. A tweet repeating the false claim read: “These are some of the people who voted in #PA … 840 were 101 or older, 39 lived through the Civil War, 45 were born in the 19th century.”
The tweet had more than 18,000 retweets. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office refuted claims that the votes were cast through deceased individuals.
“A similar complaint was filed with a Palestinian Authority court and flatly rejected,” the office said in a statement. “The court did not find any deficiencies in the way that PA maintains its voter lists, and there is currently no evidence that any deceased person voted in the 2020 election.”
Some of the claims about dead voters appear to stem from an active federal lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania did not “maintain accurate and up-to-date voter lists” that include 21,000 apparently deceased registrants. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group based in Indiana, amended the lawsuit on November 5 against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.
“This case is about ensuring that deceased registrants do not receive ballots,” said PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams in a statement. “This case is not complicated.”
Election management experts told The Associated Press that it is common for state voter rolls to include voters with birth dates that make them look incredibly old, but this is usually explained by human error, software quirks, or confidentiality issues of voters. When the date of birth is entered, the numbers can be accidentally changed or simply misspelled, according to Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona elections official who now works for the Democracy Fund, a foundation that works on voting issues.
Election officials sometimes have reason to assign certain voters a standard date of birth, which may be in the past. “Some states have a default ‘year of birth’ that they entered for records that did not have a year of birth on old paper forms when voter registration moved from paper to computer,” Jason Roberts, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he told The Associated Press.
“Those are never updated, and as time goes on, the voters with this issue seem ‘older’ whether they are or not.” In Pennsylvania, some active voters are listed with the date of birth “01/01/1800”. That date is used for “confidentiality reasons for registered voters,” such as if they are victims of domestic violence, according to a state website.
Claims that hundreds of people over 100 voted in Pennsylvania suggest something dire, but Matthew Weill, director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said that’s “not that crazy” in 2020. “There are tens of thousands. centenarians in the US, “he said.
Another theory claims that voter fraud has been discovered after women’s maiden names were used to cast votes in other states.
The false narrative that women’s maiden names were being used without their knowledge to cast votes in other states circulated with the hashtag #maidengate, targeting states such as the battlefields of Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“An electoral fraud strategy was discovered. The married women’s maiden name was used to register and accumulate additional votes. #MaidenGate, ”read a tweet.
Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for Common Cause, a nonpartisan electoral watchdog group, told the AP: “There is no evidence that this is happening.” Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that to accomplish this feat, a voter would have to go to another state and know a person’s previous name and address. They would also have to know that that person’s voter registration in the state was not already deactivated.
There are numerous safeguards to detect voting fraud like this one. “Then you have to say your name, give your address and sign an affidavit saying it was you,” Roberts said. “This is all under penalty of felony and then vote.” Even then, when a person first registers to vote, a form of identification is normally required. Albert said that under the Help America Vote Act, the first time someone votes they must be verified with identification.
“Yes, it is possible that someone’s maiden name is on the voter rolls during the time the name is changed and records are updated,” Albert said. But voting with someone else’s identity is a crime and cannot be done with thousands of people in different states. “How are you going to coordinate 10,000 people to do this?” Roberts said.
A complaint circulating in Fulton County, Georgia alleges that 132,000 ballots had a “change of address” and the votes are likely not “eligible.”
On November 8, false claims surfaced on social media regarding the votes in Fulton County, home to the state capital, Atlanta, where more than 522,000 people voted in the presidential election.
A Twitter user who shared the false information pointed to screenshots of alleged voter files, saying there were 132,000 change of address entries, or “CoA” for short.
“We have access to voter files. That is our business, ”wrote one Twitter user. “There are ≈132k CoA flags on the rolls in Fulton County, Georgia. The first image excludes CoAs, the second does not. It is not ‘disputed’. It’s reality “.
County election officials said the claims did not show an official election database and were not true. “Fulton County is aware of allegations that 132,000 ballots are ‘flagged,'” Regina Waller, a Fulton County spokeswoman, told the AP in an email.
“These claims are simply false and without foundation.” He said officials could not verify the source of the information “except that it is not an official electoral database used in Fulton County.” There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.
In fact, election officials from both political parties have publicly stated that the election went well and international observers confirmed that there were no serious irregularities.
