In October 2021, shortly before Election Day, Mahabubul Tayub was reviewing the voter rolls for the tiny Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne, where he was on the ballot as a candidate for mayor. Something didn’t seem right.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Dozens of new voters had been registered in recent weeks, he noticed, including some people he knew — people who didn’t live in Millbourne.

Tayub won the mayoral election that November, but it would take years for authorities to fully unravel what was behind the odd registrations he discovered: a brazen attempt at election fraud.

Just last month, his opponent in the 2021 race, Md Nurul Hasan, pleaded guilty in federal court to 33 felony charges in a failed scheme to steal the election by illegally registering dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then casting mail ballots on their behalf. Two associates also pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including fraudulent voter registration.

The case serves as a reality check amid a raging national debate over election security and the threat of voter fraud, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania. It’s proof, on one hand, that despite the many safeguards in place, voter fraud can happen at the local level, with lasting consequences for the community. On the other hand, it also helps illustrate how difficult it would be to orchestrate such fraud on a larger scale without detection.

“It seems to be in the local races this pops up the most, where there is a smaller turnout and there is possibly a direct connection between the person committing the bad act and the person who is going to benefit from the bad act,” said Jim Allen, the Delaware County elections director.

It’s in these small jurisdictions, he said, that “the temptation is highest and the risk-reward is highest.”

Two immigrants became friends, then competitors

Millbourne is a tiny borough at the eastern edge of Delaware County, bordering Philadelphia. It covers less than 50 acres — not even a tenth of a square mile — and has roughly 1,200 residents.

The land was originally the homestead of the Sellers family, immigrants from Derbyshire, England. In the mid 1700s, John Sellers opened Millbourne Mills, a flour mill that drew its name from nearby Mill Creek, now Cobb’s Creek — the dividing line between Delaware County and Philadelphia.

As small as it is, the borough has seen huge demographic changes in recent decades. In 1980, it was more than 90% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but by 2020, it was majority Asian. That was driven by immigration from South Asia, including India and Bangladesh.

Now, Market Street, the main thoroughfare through Millbourne, is dotted with South Asian grocery stores and boutiques selling Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani clothing. In 2023, Sellers Avenue — a short, mostly residential street named after the founding family — was given a second name: Bangladesh Avenue, a change that the local Bangladeshi community celebrated as a testament to their growing economic and political power.

Tayub, 47, grew up in Chittagong, a port city in southeast Bangladesh. He graduated from university there with a degree in economics, and moved to Philadelphia, then Millbourne in the early 2000s. Hasan, 48, is also from Chittagong, and Tayub said the two had become friendly when he and Hasan lived in the same Philadelphia building.

“All the friends [who were] the same age, all the people from Bangladesh” socialized together, Tayub recalled.

Tayub also got to know former Millbourne Mayor Tom Kramer, a Democrat who later encouraged him to run for the five-member borough council. Tayub and Hasan both launched bids as Democrats and won in the 2015 municipal election, Tayub said. (Both Tayub and Hasan are U.S. citizens.)

In the spring of 2021, Kramer decided against running for another term as mayor. Tayub entered the race, with Kramer’s support. Hasan jumped in, too.

The town’s voters skewed heavily Democratic, which meant whoever won the party primary was likely to coast to victory in the fall. And whether it was Hasan or Tayub, the winner was poised to become the first Bangladesh-born mayor of a U.S. town, a prospect that received media attention in Bangladesh.

Tayub said he wasn’t worried about the competition. “I have faith people know me,” he said.

Tayub won the primary by 18 votes out of 258 cast. But Hasan launched a write-in campaign for the November general election with the support of two other council members: Md Munsur Ali and Md Rafikul Islam, who lost his primary bid for reelection to the council. (Md is an abbreviation for Muhammad, and a common prefix for Bangladeshi names.)

How the plot unfolded

According to the federal indictment that laid out the men’s attempt to steal the election, the three conspired to obtain personal information from non-Millbourne residents — mainly friends of Hasan’s and Ali’s. Hasan then registered them to vote in Millbourne using the Department of State’s website, the indictment said — in some cases updating existing registrations by changing them to Millbourne addresses — and requested mail-in ballots on their behalf.

The indictment said Hasan and Ali told the residents of nearby communities, including Upper Darby and Philadelphia, that they would not get in trouble, so long as they “did not vote in another election in November 2021.”

The indictment described an effort to “cover up the fact that defendant HASAN was requesting mail-in ballots for dozens of different people,” in which Hasan alternated email addresses when registering the voters, as well as the addresses, and requested that the mail ballots be sent to various locations.

According to the indictment, after receiving the ballots, Hasan and the others wrote in Hasan’s name for mayor and cast the ballots. In all, the indictment says, Hasan and his co-conspirators fraudulently registered nearly three dozen people.

The indictment doesn’t identify the voters who were registered improperly, but one of the people whom Hasan registered confirmed his involvement and agreed to speak with Votebeat and Spotlight PA on condition of anonymity, out of concern that their involvement in the scheme could jeopardize their current employment.

The voter confirmed giving Hasan their driver’s license and allowing Hasan to proceed with the Millbourne registration and request a mail ballot for them.

“I trusted him and thought if I only give one vote, it’s not a problem,” said the person. “He made us fools.”

Suspicion ahead of Election Day: ‘I know these people.’

The votes hadn’t even been counted when Millbourne residents began to catch on to the scheme. According to the indictment, the borough added 29 voters between the primary and the November election. Given that Millbourne had fewer than 600 voters, it was a noticeable jump.

After Tayub grew suspicious of the new voter registrations, he brought his concerns to Kramer, the departing mayor, though neither man remembers exactly when.

“I know these people, they never live [in] Millbourne,” Tayub recalled thinking when he saw some newly registered names. “They live [in] Upper Darby.” Tayub’s attorney filed a complaint with the county elections office on Oct. 28, 2021. Tayub and Kramer said they also reported the matter to law enforcement around the time of the election. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a question about when and how they became aware of the matter.

Allen, the county elections director, said in an email that Hasan himself had questioned some voter registrations months earlier, in April, and his office had referred that matter to the district attorney. Allen wrote that in the months and years after Tayub’s complaints, “we received and responded to periodic inquiries from investigators.”

But Tayub and others in Millbourne said they grew frustrated because although the county was taking steps to look into the situation, for nearly a year afterward, they didn’t observe much progress.

“I couldn’t take it,” Tayub said during a recent interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Tayub, Kramer, and the borough’s secretary, Nancy Baulis, all met with an assistant district attorney before the May 2022 primary to discuss the status of the case, and Baulis and Kramer followed up with emails to county officials, including the district attorney, a few months later expressing frustration about the apparent lack of movement.

Kramer shared those emails with Votebeat and Spotlight PA. In his, he wrote that the assistant district attorney at the meeting had said that “this particular situation was very problematic politically,” and would generate media interest.

In an interview, Kramer said after sending that email, he reached out to the FBI. He said the investigation seemed to pick up after that.

The federal indictment came in February 2025.

The county separately charged Hasan with unlawful voting and related charges in March, and the case is pending. Because of that, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said he could not discuss the matter, but said in an email that it is “inaccurate” to say that the county did not move quickly on the case before the FBI’s involvement.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the assistant district attorney Kramer mentioned in his email responded to a request for comment on what Kramer said he was told at the May 2022 meeting.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said it “first became aware of the fraud allegations when it was contacted by federal law enforcement.”

“I don’t have any comment beyond stating the obvious, that there has been a prosecution,” Allen, the county election director, said. “It was a very difficult matter to investigate because you can’t make assumptions [based on] ‘Well, this house looks empty.’ Well, was it empty last fall? How do you know it’s empty? Did someone move out?”

Asked after an April borough council meeting if he had any explanation or comment, Hasan declined. “I don’t want to say anything now,” Hasan said.

Hasan’s attorney, Michael Dugan, said his client had no comment in response to a list of questions about the scheme. Islam, Ali, and their respective attorneys did not respond to emails with detailed questions for this story.

The reality of election fraud vs. false claims

Cases like Millbourne’s muddy the intensifying national debate over election fraud: how widespread it is, what to do about it, and, more fundamentally, whether our election system can be trusted.

In recent years, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories about election manipulation has flourished online. Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University, has researched the kind of broad claims of systematic election fraud that President Donald Trump and his allies made after the 2020 election to explain his loss, and said he has found no evidence of any such conspiracy.

But Grimmer’s research has turned up real instances of fraud, and they typically look like what happened in Millbourne — a local race, involving a relatively small number of votes.

“I think it gives some insight into why it would be very hard to do this in a broad national way,” he said. “This sort of fraud will leave lots of markers that people will end up discovering.”

The kind of “marker” Grimmer is referencing is the evidence Tayub was able to cite: actual names and addresses for the people who were drawn into the scheme.

Scaling a scheme like the one in Millbourne to one that involves enough votes to swing a statewide or national election would be hard, Grimmer said, because it would involve so many people.

The perpetrators here had access to driver’s license numbers, which according to the indictment they got directly from the voters. Allen, the county election director, said he was unaware of any other fraud case where voters gave out their personal information like this.

Stephanie Singer, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who was in office in 2016 when a ballot box stuffing scheme orchestrated by a former congressman was happening, has developed an algorithm that looks for anomalies in election results in the hopes of catching attempted fraud. Georgia is currently using the program to monitor its elections.

“Part of the job, not just of the board of elections, but of us as a democratic populace, is to guard against that,” she said. “The people who win the elections have access to money and power, and that means it’s really tempting to cheat.”

These attempts to cheat, even if they are initially successful at changing the results, are frequently caught, and election officials uphold those cases as examples of the safeguards working. Even so, the very fact that they occur can help destroy trust in elections.

Incidents like those in Millbourne and in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race that required a new election can serve as a “proof of concept” for those already suspicious that election fraud is happening, Grimmer said.

He recalled a county elections meeting in Oregon where he was trying to counter points made by a speaker who believed there was a broad conspiracy to steal elections, and cited a local incident from California as an example.

“In that setting, I can explain that it’s very different than the kind of conspiracy he’s alleging,” he said. “But if someone’s suspicious, all of a sudden it does reveal that it is possible to do this at least on a small scale.”

“If I’m not sufficiently persuasive in that meeting that it’s hard to scale this up,” he added, “you could see how this can further undermine trust” in election administration.

In Millbourne, the story isn’t over

Nearly four years after the election fraud, and a month after the guilty pleas, a tense mood still hung over Millbourne’s five-member borough council.

Two members resigned recently for reasons unrelated to the fraud case, which until recently left only three members, including Hasan and Ali. Despite their convictions, the men refused to immediately resign, and weren’t legally required to do so. Sentencing is scheduled for June.

By staying in office, Hasan and Ali allowed the borough to keep conducting council business. Without them, the council wouldn’t have had enough members.

But recent council meetings were marked by fraught exchanges over the matter.

The borough council building is a tight space. A sliding partition and support pillar split the room between attendees and the U-shaped arrangement of folding tables where council members sit.

At an April 15 meeting, Kramer, the former mayor, stepped in front of the pillar when it was his turn to offer public comment.

“I’d like to address our felonious council people,” Kramer said, facing Hasan and Ali. “I wanted to ask if either one of you had any intention of resigning.”

The eyes of the other borough officials shifted to Hasan to see how he would respond.

Hasan, wearing a purple button-down shirt and gray jacket, looked uncomfortable as he answered, shifting his feet and looking around the room or down at his papers.

“Actually the court has a restriction,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything.”

But on May 13, borough officials confirmed that Hasan had formally submitted his resignation, though the council has yet to accept it.

As of Tuesday, Ali had not resigned.

Getting a public official out of elected office — outside of defeating them at the ballot box — is not simple, even if the official has pleaded guilty to a felony.

“It’s not just automatic,” James Gallagher, the borough’s solicitor, explained at an April meeting. He said Hasan and Ali’s resignations would be “in the best interest of the borough.”

The state Legislature can impeach local elected officials, but rarely uses that power. The other option is a quo warranto action, a legal action challenging a public official’s right to hold office, typically brought by the district attorney or state attorney general.

Chris Cosfol, a resident of Millbourne, said he wants the district attorney’s office to bring such an action. The ordeal has been “embarrassing” for the borough, he said, and he thinks the members should have automatically been removed from office once they entered a guilty plea.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the attorney general has yet taken such action.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

A conservative activist is claiming that Pennsylvania has “tens of thousands” of voters improperly registered, but state officials say he’s misrepresenting a normal, legal part of the voter registration system.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The commonwealth regularly cleans its voter rolls to eliminate names of people who have moved out of the state or otherwise become ineligible. This process isn’t immediate. It can take several years, as counties are required to send voters notices to make sure they’re not improperly disenfranchised.

All of this is regulated by federal and state law.

But that hasn’t stopped Scott Presler from using these routine lags to suggest that something is wrong with voter registrations, Democratic ones in particular.

Presler, who has been among Donald Trump most vocal supporters in Pennsylvania, says he has used an unnamed artificial intelligence tool to identify voters registered in multiple states simultaneously. Presler suggested those registrations were fraudulent and said he would refer them to law enforcement, though he said he hasn’t done so yet.

But multiple registrations themselves aren’t a sign of fraud or illegal voting. In fact, they can be a sign of the law working as intended to protect voters’ rights.

How federal and state law affects timing of removals

In states around the country, people can remain on the voter rolls for years after moving to another state. A federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, governs how voters can be removed from the rolls.

In cases where election officials learn someone may have moved out of their jurisdiction, such as from change-of-address data provided by the U.S. Postal Service, the law requires that election officials provide notice to the voter of their intent to remove them. If the voter doesn’t confirm the move, they may have to confirm their address before they can vote in their original jurisdiction. But they can’t be removed until they’ve missed voting in two consecutive general elections after being notified. That could be as long as four years.

Under Pennsylvania law, those notices are also sent to any voters who have not participated in an election for five years or updated their registration. That means it can take as long as eight or nine years to remove a voter who has moved, if the NVRA removal process begins after that. According to a 2024 report from the Department of State, in 2023 counties sent out 4,320 notices of duplicate voter registrations and more than 44,000 notices to voters believed to have moved out of state.

Actually voting in two separate jurisdictions in the same election is illegal. Election officials refer such double-voting cases for prosecution, and studies have found it to be very rare.

As for duplicate registrations, states have long shared data to try and identify and resolve them promptly.

Much of this work is done through the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a bipartisan multi-state data-sharing compact aimed at addressing this exact issue.

ERIC compares data from member states, along with other sources such as the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, to identify cross-state movers, so that states can start removing those names. ERIC says it has identified more than 13 million cross-state moves since its inception in 2013.

But several Republican-led states abandoned ERIC in recent years after it became the target of misinformation, undercutting efforts at cross-state collaboration.

Pennsylvania changes are part of routine voter roll maintenance

Presler’s misleading claims go beyond the notion that the duplicate registrations indicate fraud. In his public comments and in an interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA, he has suggested that his claims led the Pennsylvania Department of State to shift more than 10,000 Democratic voters from active to inactive — although it is counties, not the state, that manage voter registrations.

In the week between Feb. 3 and Feb. 10 Pennsylvania’s weekly voter roll statistics showed that about 14,500 registered Democrats moved from active to inactive status. But the Department of State said those shifts had nothing to do with Presler.

“All voter cancellations this week — like any other week — are the result of counties performing routine voter roll maintenance in accordance with the law, as they do consistently year-round,” State Department spokesperson Amy Gulli said in an email. “To our knowledge, zero cancellations have resulted from Presler’s ‘research.’”

About 2,000 Republicans and 3,300 unaffiliated or third party voters also shifted from active to inactive that same week.

A review of weekly data since the beginning of 2024 also shows that while 14,500 voters shifting status is relatively high for one week, similar shifts happened in at least seven other instances during that year.

Most of the registration changes happened in Philadelphia, which Presler has specifically called out on social media. Philadelphia’s history of election fraud has helped feed conspiracy theories and unfounded allegations targeting the city.

But Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia, said the number of status changes in the city is both normal and unrelated to Presler. Philadelphia is by far the state’s largest city, and predominantly Democratic.

Bluestein said that last Tuesday, before Presler began posting about duplicate voters in the city, city workers had processed a large backlog of national change-of-address and returned-mail data, which accounts for the increase in status changes. All three city commissioners’ offices confirmed Presler had not contacted them.

Federal law restricts systematic cleaning of voter rolls in the 90-day period leading up federal elections, so it is normal for more of that work to take place in the months after the election. In January 2024, for instance, Philadelphia moved roughly 17,000 Democrats from active to inactive status in one week.

Presler’s efforts aren’t strictly aimed at voter roll integrity. He has linked his campaign for removing duplicate registrations to his goal of flipping the state from a plurality of registered Democrats to a plurality of Republicans.

The commonwealth currently has 185,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Secretaries of state and election officials from across the nation gathered at separate conferences this past week in Washington, where the new administration has been moving quickly to slash the federal workforce and dismantle certain agencies.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

One pressing question at the gatherings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors was how the shift in power will affect collaborations with federal agencies that help safeguard elections, including the FBI, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

So far, it’s hard to tell.

Commissioners and staff members from the EAC — a small agency that serves as a clearinghouse for best practices, federal grants, and data, and assesses whether voting machines meet federal standards — were visible at both conferences, and said their work continues.

A representative of the FBI’s cybersecurity division appeared at NASS, where she spoke on a panel about cybersecurity threats. An FBI representative who was expected to join a panel at NASED didn’t show.

The most glaring absence was CISA, whose reserved table at the NASED conference remained empty.

“CISA was telling us that in light of the new administration, they were reevaluating their conference attendance,” said Amy Cohen, executive director for NASED.

CISA was created in 2018, the year after federal officials designated elections as critical infrastructure. Since then, the agency has been an important partner for election officials, providing security assessments, training, and resources aimed at “protect(ing) America’s election infrastructure against new and evolving threats.”

But the agency angered President Donald Trump after it declared the November 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” disputing the false claims by Trump and his allies that fraud cost him victory. Trump responded by firing Chris Krebs, the agency’s first director, before he left office in 2021.

More recently, CISA has drawn the ire of Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the cybersecurity agency. During her Senate confirmation hearing in January, she called for shrinking the agency.

Election officials noticed the agency’s absence.

“I note the incongruity with the fact that many of you, maybe all of you, mentioned cybersecurity … and the empty table out front that says CISA on it," Judd Choate, elections director for Colorado, told a panel of congressional staffers, an absence that he said he could “only interpret as: They were told not to attend.”

A CISA spokesperson told Votebeat that because of funding uncertainties — Congress passed a short-term funding bill that expires in March — the agency is “reevaluating all conferences and engagements until a resolution.” The agency did not say whether it had been directed not to send representatives to the conferences, or whether it would continue providing services to election officials.

Kim Wyman, a former senior election security adviser at CISA who was secretary of state for Washington during the 2020 election, said she was “certainly concerned” about the agency’s absence, but she’s trying not to read too much into it.

Wyman said CISA was a useful resource for her as secretary of state when she needed physical and cyber security assessments for local elections offices that would help them determine where improvements could be made.

“Having that direct connection to CISA gave, particularly our local counties, a lot of powerful resources to secure their systems,” she said.

Wyman, now a senior fellow on elections at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said there have been some recent “bright spots” in the federal government’s relationship with election officials, pointing specifically to the continuation of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, both of which are funded by CISA.

“That for me was a big positive indication that election officials are going to have these tools available,” she said. “But I am concerned that some of the direct services, like [CISA’s] elections security advisers that are in each of the 10 regions, I hope that they continue to be able to perform those duties and stay in those roles.”

Trump has yet to name a nominee to head CISA. The most recent director, Biden appointee Jen Easterly, departed at the end of the last administration. Last week, the Trump administration placed at least seven CISA employees who work on combating foreign disinformation within the election security arm of the agency on administrative leave, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

Cohen, the NASED director, said that cyber and physical security remains a top concern for election officials.

“It is concerning that they are not here,” she said. “I hope it is not indicative of a larger shift, but it’s hard not to take it that way.”

One federal agency, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, did signal plans to work more closely with secretaries of state on elections. Election officials, primarily from Republican states, have lobbied for more access to federal data to help them determine the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls, and in some cases have sued.

CIS maintains the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, or SAVE, which allows states a way to check an individual’s immigration status, based on a unique DHS-issued identification number.

Tammy Meckley, a CIS representative who spoke on a panel at the secretaries of state conference, said the fee her agency charges for using that service is supposed to rise to $3.10 per transaction by 2028.

Meckley said she is open to working with election officials in what she described as “a different political landscape” to find other ways to search that would produce accurate matches “with a high degree of confidence.”

Interim Editor-in-Chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

For the last several weeks, election watchdogs and many other people have been abuzz over the rather strange actions of the Georgia State Elections Board.

The most recent one: The board decided last week that every precinct must now complete a hand count of ballot totals, to make sure that they match the tallies from the machine counts before the county can certify the election results. While some initially interpreted the rule to mean hand-counting all votes, the rule requires only that the number of ballots be tallied. That will take less time than a full hand count of votes, but it doesn’t mean it won’t cause problems or delays, especially since local election officials will have to add a step to their processes, with just weeks to go before the election.

State officials didn’t want this.

“Misguided efforts to impose new procedures like hand counting ballots at polling locations make it likely that Georgians will not know the results on Election Night,” Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, warned in August, before the board voted to approve the change. “Georgia law already has secure chain of custody protocols for handling ballots, and efforts to change these laws by unelected bureaucrats on the eve of the election introduces the opportunity for error, lost or stolen ballots, and fraud.”

The state attorney general, Christopher Carr, had advised the board that the hand-counting proposal was likely unlawful, because the legislature had not empowered the board to create such a requirement. Like a majority of the state elections board, including every member who supported this change, Raffensperger and Carr are both Republicans.

All of this is likely to spark more litigation. The Georgia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee already sued the state elections board late last month over new rules governing how local officials finalize vote totals, contending they would cause “chaos” in the upcoming election. A hearing is scheduled in Fulton County in early October.

So that you can understand the implications of the new rule requiring the hand-tally of ballots, let’s start by explaining how voting works in Georgia: People voting in person select their candidates on a touchscreen voting machine, which prints out a paper ballot, like a receipt from a cash register. That paper ballot includes a list of the voter’s choices and a QR code that can be read by a separate tabulator machine. The voter takes their ballot printout and places it in the tabulator, which scans the code and tallies the votes.

Under the new rules, there are more steps. At the end of voting on election night, after removing the ballots from the scanner, three poll workers have to count them, by hand. When all three agree on the total number of ballots they have, the rules require them to document that number and sign off on it. Then they have to check that number against the ballot totals recorded on the voting machines. Any inconsistencies must be documented, and the person in charge of the precinct is responsible for determining how the error occurred.

In isolation, the requirements in Georgia seem harmless: Why should it be a big deal to require three people to count some paper, and agree on the number they’ve counted, to make sure that no ballots were counted or excluded improperly?

Actually, there are a lot of reasons.

First, changing the rules this close to Go Time is inherently harmful: Poll workers have been recruited, many have been trained, and the handbooks that dictate how they do their jobs have been printed. Late changes mean that poll workers are deviating from the process they understand, and officials are scrambling to revise these procedures at the last minute. Given the number of ballots that will be cast in Georgia —around 5 million were cast in the 2020 general election — this is unlikely to go perfectly in the hundreds of precincts across the state.

And Raffensperger is right: This is a huge change to Georgia’s “chain of custody” requirements for ballots. It introduces a lot more fingers to the process. It also means more opportunity for error, and more time before results can be reported.

“In smaller precincts, these delays should be minimal — there being not that many ballots cast. For larger precincts, the delays may be more substantial,” writes Anna Bower at Lawfare. “If larger precincts opt to hand count ballots on election night, then reporting of results could be delayed by several hours. A few hours could stretch into a day or two if a precinct puts off hand counting until the next day, as the rule allows.”

It’s during such delays, as we saw in 2020, that purveyors of election misinformation go to work, planting false notions about ballot dumping, poll worker misconduct, or fraud to explain pauses or anomalies in reported results and subsequent swings in vote totals.

Arizona introduced its own hand-count requirement — though it did so months ago, giving election officials more time to adapt procedures. The Arizona rule requires counties to hand-count the number of ballot envelopes dropped off at polling centers on Election Day before any ballots are tabulated. It applies only to ballots dropped off, not ballots cast at the centers themselves.

Still, it’s likely to cause delays. After the July primary, Maricopa elections spokesperson Jennifer Liewer said the process added about 30 minutes to the reporting time for the county’s results. She said the delay is likely to be longer in the general election, when hundreds of thousands of ballots are likely to be dropped off.

Georgia is one of several states considering last-minute changes in the way elections are administered. In North Carolina, litigation around whether students could use digital IDs to vote went down to the last minute. In Pennsylvania, long-running court disputes have left in limbo the rules over whether mail ballots with dating errors should be counted and how voters can overcome their mistakes. And in Nebraska, Republicans mounted an unsuccessful last-ditch effort to change the way the state’s Electoral College votes are apportioned in an attempt to help Donald Trump — a change that could have tipped the election outcome.

The vast majority of counties will pull off their elections with no issue. But last-minute changes in procedures increase the likelihood of mistakes that — even if they don’t prevent certification — will add confusion and delays in the reporting of results.

And, as we have all seen, confusion and delays in the results have led candidates (and voters) to make harmful false claims that shape people’s perceptions of the election for years. We will certainly see that this year.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

As the presidential election approaches, Pennsylvania is facing a deficit of experienced election directors, increasing the risk of errors that could cause difficulties for voters, disenfranchise their votes, and ignite disputes over results.

In total, 58 officials who served during the November 2019 election have left. Compared with experience levels during the 2019 election, the state has lost a combined 293 years of experience among the top county election officials as of this publishing date, according to a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of county data. The state currently has 21% fewer years of experience than it did for the November 2019 election.

Recent ballot printing and administration errors in Greene and Luzerne counties, among others, show that having less-experienced county administrators can result in more problems occurring in an election. One of Greene County’s errors last year was an incorrect instruction telling voters to vote for up to three candidates in a commissioner race that allowed only two selections, which would have invalided their votes if they had done so.

“I think the loss of experienced election directors at the county level is one of the biggest dangers we face,” Secretary of State Al Schmidt said at a recent event in Lebanon County. “That turnover creates an environment where it’s more likely for mistakes to be made.”

The Department of State is hoping training programs and guidance on the highly technical aspects of running an election will help smooth the transition for new directors.

Just in the past four months, the state lost three directors with roughly 45 combined years of experience. One of those directors was Jerry Feaser, Dauphin County’s director of more than a decade who was well-respected by his colleagues in the state. Feaser, 57, said that his December retirement was pre-planned for several years but that the changes to the job since 2019 reinforced his decision not to serve through another presidential election.

The combination of new voting machines in 2019 and the introduction of no-excuse mail-in voting already presented a challenging environment for the 2020 presidential election, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, “the wheels started falling off the bus.” Then allies and followers of Donald Trump started questioning the outcome and election administration process itself.

“It was just like, OK, I’ll put my 10 years in and then I’m heading off,’” he said. “It really took it out of me.”

Two more years and he would have qualified for his county pension, but Feaser joked that “those two years, I don’t know if I’ll live through them.”

He wasn’t alone in feeling overwhelmed.

Of the 58 county administrators who oversaw or helped run the November 2019 election and have since left, half departed in 2020. Long-term administrators have continued to leave in the years since, but not at such a level.

Kathy Boockvar, who was the secretary of state for the 2020 election, said the challenges Feaser mentioned — plus the calls for audits, recount petitions, and influx of records requests — created a demanding new work environment for administrators. “It’s not hard to see why there’s been such an exodus,” she said. “It’s been such a challenging few years.”

High turnover risks an increase in mistakes

Some departures, like Feaser’s, were retirements. But regardless of their reason for leaving, data and case studies bear out the intuitive notion that the less experience a county has in its election office, the more errors are likely to occur.

Errors such as instructing voters to vote for the wrong number of candidates, candidates or races being left off the ballot, or improper ballot return instructions have been increasing since 2019.

Four of the five counties with the most ballot and administrative errors since 2019 — as identified through research by Votebeat, Spotlight PA, and the Open Source Election Technology Institute — also were among the counties with the highest turnover.

County and state election officials agreed this past fall that the sharp increase in ballot errors seen in 2023 was due to election official turnover.

And in Luzerne County, where a ballot paper shortage in the 2022 midterm elections prompted outcry from residents and national scrutiny, an investigation by the district attorney determined turnover and the staff’s inexperience were at the heart of the issue.

Luzerne’s most recent director, Eryn Harvey, who returned to the director position in 2023 after that debacle, is departing, leaving the office again with an acting director as it heads into the primary.

“If you’ve never worked in an election, it is difficult to come in that office,” Feaser said.

Feaser’s replacement, deputy Chris Spackman, had the benefit of working closely with Feaser over the past two years, knowing he would be the director when Feaser retired. Other counties are adopting this peer-mentoring strategy as well.

In Snyder County, the former long-time director Patricia Nace has been brought back in a consultant role to help advise Devin Rhoads, the new election director who began in May. Rhoads said she has helped fill in gaps in his knowledge.

When Rhoads first began, there was a lot to learn, and the information coming from the Department of State wasn’t always clear because it contained abbreviations that new directors might not understand.

“Sometimes I wish it would be more like a cookbook,” he said. “So that’s one of the hardest things is we’re just new to this and we don’t know what all these abbreviations and things mean.”

But, since May, things have improved. The Department of State is also tapping into the hands-on experience of election administrators to provide support. It recently hired Dori Sawyer, an election director with roughly two and a half years of experience from Montgomery County, to lead training for new directors.

“I think they finally realized ‘Oh my, we have all these new people and they don’t know what to do,’ " Rhoads said. He recently joined the state’s trainings on its voter roll management system and mail-in ballot applications.

Schmidt said the department established its training unit to help with transferring institutional knowledge, and it hired a former election director because they wanted someone “who’s been in the trenches” that “can speak from experience.”

In addition to the training unit, the department has created a calendar for directors that identifies pre- and post-election duties and deadlines for 2024, released a new version of its ballot review checklist for counties to use as a resource, and bolstered its county liaison program, among other initiatives.

Schmidt said in his experience he has found that directors are invested in running elections right in all counties because they understand that errors will give “bad actors” something to take advantage of. Schmidt, a Republican, was a city commissioner in Philadelphia during the 2020 election, and achieved national prominence for pushing back against Trump’s claims of fraud.

Still, there is room for improvement.

Boockvar, who now runs a consultancy on election security, said the legislature should act to provide more resources for training and provide better standards for universal practices like poll worker training and pre-election equipment testing.

“This is something where there should be help given by the Department of State,” she said. “But for the DOS to do that well, there needs to be statutes to support them and there also needs to be funding to support them. … If the statutes don’t actually dictate what is a best practice, who has the responsibility?”

The state’s Election Code limits the authority of the secretary of the commonwealth to dictate policy statewide. Some observers have complained that it leaves county directors unsure of how to approach many issues, and the effect is non-uniform voting policies from county to county.

Major election law reform is unlikely to occur in a presidential election year, so for now new directors will have to make due with the rules and resources in place.

Feaser, the recently retired Dauphin County director, recommends new directors study ballots from past cycles, learn about the positions on the ballot, work closely with their solicitors, reach out to neighboring counties’ directors, and take advantage of the County Commissioner Association of Pennsylvania’s listserv for election officials, where directors share resources and ask questions.

“You need to be able to understand and explain the process,” Feaser said. “Because if you can’t explain it, it undermines faith in the process.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

On Jan. 6, 2021, as former President Donald Trump rallied his supporters, he used a statistic that, though false, was making the rounds: “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters,” he screamed, throwing his arms wide open in front of thousands of angry followers. “This is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud.”

The number appears to be the work of Heather Honey, a Pennsylvania-based “election integrity” investigator whose research has achieved a remarkable level of national salience among the far right, despite being replete with errors. The 205,000 figure, for example, is “false” according to the Department of Justice, and was based on incomplete data the state says can’t be used for this type of analysis. Honey herself has revised the discrepancy downward. While Honey’s current estimate is almost half of what it once was, it’s still inaccurate and the original number is also still routinely cited as fact.

“There were 202,377 MORE ‘votes’ cast, than actual REAL VOTERS THAT VOTED,” reads a November 2023 post on X from a popular rightwing account. It was reposted more than 13,000 times.

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Honey has been among the most effective advocates for right-wing election talking points. Time after time, her research has fed into viral allegations about election integrity, fueling conservative pressure campaigns, forcing fact-checkers and public officials to attempt to piece together a more accurate picture and undermining confidence in long-trusted election practices. Often, her conclusions are misleading or based on incomplete information.

In the past year, working with a network of election integrity groups organized by conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Honey has had perhaps the most success with her latest research: A 29-page report on the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, sent to Republican secretaries of state and legislators. Her information appears to have influenced the decision of several member states to withdraw from ERIC, an interstate program that election officials widely regard as the nation’s best tool to keep voter rolls up-to-date and free of bloat.

An analysis by Votebeat and Spotlight PA found the report’s conclusions are false, often based on out-of-context examples, and that her sweeping generalizations are frequently not backed by the data she presents. Presented with Votebeat’s and Spotlight PA’s findings — the product of redoing her many calculations and fact-checking the analysis she has offered to public officials — Honey defended her work.

Despite how widespread her research has become, Honey described herself in emails to Votebeat and Spotlight PA as “an ordinary citizen working hard to do what I can to restore confidence in elections.”

When asked for a final comment, she accused Votebeat of “slander” and personal attacks. “Who is pressuring you to write this hit piece? What is your goal?”

The way that Honey relies on real-but-incomplete data is a hallmark of those who spread misinformation, experts say.

“The fundamental misconception people have about misinformation is that misinformation is about the facts in front of you,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies mis- and disinformation. Instead, Caulfield said, popular misinformation often relies on leaving out crucial details.

Calling it “misrepresented evidence,” Caulfield likened Honey’s report to a prosecutor accurately telling a jury that they discovered a murder weapon in a suspect’s possession but failing to mention that the fingerprints on it belonged to someone else.

“You can’t look at that and say, ‘The knife is real, we found the knife,’ but not look at it and mention you found fingerprints that would undermine the importance of the evidence,” he said.

Activated by 2020

As Honey tells her own origin story, she was standing in line at her polling place in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 3, 2020, behind an older couple when her journey to election integrity investigator began.

“It really kind of struck me that, you know, this woman who just waited in line for an hour was told ‘oh, you have to cast a provisional ballot,’” Honey said on Mitchell’s “Who’s Counting” podcast in May 2022. She told Mitchell she wondered if the provisional would be rejected. “So it just got me a little bit worked up and I went home and I started doing, I mean, what I do.”

Honey has operated Haystack Investigations — a private investigations and supply-chain auditing consultancy — since 2017, her LinkedIn profile shows. Her website offers services ranging from supply chain audits to social media investigations.

Using what she’s described as “open-source investigation” skills, Honey began researching Pennsylvania’s election laws and requesting data from the Pennsylvania Department of State in November 2020. Soon after, she decided to reach out to her state representative, Frank Ryan, a Republican, with her findings.

“I said ‘look, here are the things that I found,’” she told Mitchell. One of those things was “that there were more ballots reported than what we found in the voter files.”

Honey told Mitchell that Ryan gathered other representatives together to show them her work — that is, a calculation purporting to show a discrepancy between the number of ballots cast in the 2020 election and the number of people the Pennsylvania roll recorded as having voted.

Ryan did not respond to an interview request, though Mitchell’s version closely mirrors his public telling of events, and emails — on which Honey is included — show Ryan passed this information onto U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican who was in close contact with Trump at the time. According to the final report of the January 6 committee, Trump would repeat the claim that Pennsylvania had more votes than voters numerous times, which was part of the Department of Justice indictment against him alleging election interference.

Honey told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that Ryan was receiving information from multiple sources at the time, but she did not directly dispute that Trump’s figures originated with her work.

Honey’s latest calculation of the discrepancy, revised after straggling counties uploaded fresher records, sits at around 121,000. Trump cited that number, and Honey’s work directly, in a document he released in January claiming fraud in swing states in 2020.

Still, election administrators in Pennsylvania say this number is based on a flawed analysis.

Voter roll data is constantly updated to account for moves, deaths, and other issues of eligibility, which stops in the weeks just before an election and resumes again immediately after, the Department of State and county election directors explained. The roll also does not contain information about some voters whose identity must legally be kept confidential, such as victims of abuse. In other words, the state’s voter roll at any one point in time doesn’t reflect a complete record of who voted in the last election. But Honey’s analysis treats the roll as if it does.

For example, if a voter in Philadelphia moved to New Jersey the day after the 2020 election, the Philadelphia Board of Elections would cancel their registration. And even though they legitimately cast a ballot in Philadelphia on Election Day, their voter history would not appear in the voter roll system after that because they have been removed from the rolls.

Given these limitations, the Department of State told Votebeat and Spotlight PA, Honey’s method of analysis is “not an accurate way to reconcile votes cast to the number of voters who participated in any individual election” and that the system “was not intended” for this purpose. The state pushed back on the figure at the time, but that didn’t stop it from spreading.

As Honey’s research gained traction, other election-integrity advocates began to take notice and solicit her for work. She was paid as a subcontractor in Arizona for Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by that state’s Senate to investigate the 2020 election in Maricopa County. That investigation ultimately did not prove any fraud. Documents from it — obtained by American Oversight and the Arizona Republic — show she was a “manager” and billed tens of thousands of dollars for her work, though it is unclear how much she was eventually paid.

Cyber Ninjas subsequently went out of business, but Honey’s work continued.

Days before the 2022 midterm elections, Honey released a report — through her election integrity research organization, Verity Vote — claiming nearly a quarter of a million ballots in Pennsylvania had been sent to “unverified” voters. Rep. Ryan again picked up the information in a letter to the Department of State. It was then echoed by Trump, and conservative website the Gateway Pundit pointed to it as evidence that the election was fraudulent and should be decertified.

The report “flagrantly misrepresents” how the system works, the Department of State — which rebutted it after it gained traction online — said at the time. Voters were labeled as “NV” or “not verified” in the state’s voter management system, but as the Associated Press reported, the label is for internal workflow purposes and typically means the identification provided by the voter is still being verified by county workers so their ballots can be counted.

A more refined ERIC criticism

In 2022, as ERIC became the subject of right-wing fury, Honey began her own research.

The program was formed in 2012 as a project at the Pew Research Center before becoming an independent nonprofit. It continues to be governed by member states, and uses state voter rolls, death records, motor vehicle records, and other information to cross-check state voter rolls for accuracy. It also identifies voters who may be eligible to vote but unregistered — referred to as EBUs — and requires states to reach out to those potential voters about registering.

ERIC does not add or remove any voters itself. It only provides lists of voters to states, and states and counties then verify the accuracy of ERIC information before they remove voters from the rolls. Voters who register in response to the outreach must meet all voter registration requirements.

By June 2022, ERIC had grown to include 33 states and the District of Columbia. Prior to conservative attacks — including those fueled by Honey’s research — it drew bipartisan praise from officials for its ability to help clean voter rolls, including from some of those same officials who would take up Honey’s talking points.

In January 2022, an article from the right-wing outlet the Gateway Pundit accused ERIC of being “a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up.” Louisiana soon after announced it was suspending its membership. Officials told Votebeat at the time the decision was unrelated to the coverage but that “numerous” experts on “election stuff” had advised the state to leave ERIC, office spokesman John Tobler said.

Louisiana would be the only state to part with the program for several months after the Gateway Pundit’s story was published. In the interim, Honey released her report, offering apparent backing to the charges laid out by the site.

While it reached many of the same conclusions as the Gateway Pundit, Honey’s report offered a more professionalized critique of ERIC with historical research, original first-hand documentation, and data analysis. It appears to have contributed to Virginia, Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana withdrawing from the compact, as well as North Carolina’s decision to halt its process of joining.

Flaws and omissions in Honey’s ERIC report

In June 2022, Mitchell — a conservative attorney who represented Trump in Georgia in 2020 — hosted a conference in Washington, D.C. There, Honey gave a presentation on ERIC to several secretaries of state or their representatives, according to information obtained by Documented, a D.C.-based investigative news outlet, and provided to Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Mitchell did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

At the same time, Honey released her ERIC report on her website.

The report repeatedly asserts misleading claims. For example, she writes “after 10 years of ERIC, there is no evidence that it has led to an improvement in accuracy or clean voter rolls.” She attempts to prove that by comparing the number of voter roll removals in ERIC states vs. non-ERIC states. That comparison, however, relies entirely on a single metric — the number of removals in one category released in one year.

She claims that her research — using data released bi-annually by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — shows that ERIC states removed proportionally fewer voters who had moved out of their voting districts than non-ERIC states had in the same time period.

Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at MIT who studies elections and works with EAC data, says the data shouldn’t be used in this way. It is often unreliable because it contains gaps and basic mathematical errors, and sometimes doesn’t match what states independently report. Stewart is a member of ERIC’s Research Advisory Board, which advises the organization on how it can measure its performance. He also disagreed with the premise of Honey’s analysis, since ERIC is not responsible for removing any voter from the voter rolls and ERIC member states are “at the mercy” of local jurisdictions like counties that actually act on the data ERIC provides.

But the data can provide a rough measure of ERIC’s performance. Using data available to Honey at the time of her report, Votebeat and Spotlight PA repeated her analysis and found that the conclusion of her report is misleading. She appears to have chosen the singular datapoint that supported her claim, out of a series of voter-removal metrics in the same data set. And, despite the availability of multiple years of such data, Honey used only one — 2020, an outlier year. Taken together, Honey left out 11 of 12 relevant data points in her report.

Votebeat’s and Spotlight PA’s analysis, which used all 12 data points available at the time her report was published, suggests exactly the opposite: ERIC states remove a higher percentage of voters from the rolls than non-ERIC states. Data from a more recent year — 2022 — also supports that conclusion.

Asked to explain her selective use of data, Honey did not respond to some questions and offered answers to others that contradict the logic of her analysis. For example, asked to explain why she only used a single metric from one year, Honey said in an email that it would be inappropriate to analyze one of the other categories — removal of voters who died — in state-to-state comparisons, since some states, like Pennsylvania, do not use ERIC’s death data. But Honey’s analysis has the same flaw, as not all ERIC member states use ERIC’s moved-voter data uniformly, either.

Honey did not address why she only analyzed the EAC’s data from one year, when four were available at the time she published her report.

Elsewhere in the report, Honey claims that the outreach to eligible but unregistered residents, or EBUs, that ERIC requires member states to conduct “results in significant swelling of voter rolls,” and that “EBU additions consistently exceed suggested removals by ten times.”

But available data doesn’t support Honey’s conclusions.

“The report is obsessed with EBUs,” Stewart said. “I just take, overall, the report as part of building the case that ERIC is this left wing organization that is trying to get Democrats onto the voter rolls.”

To conclude additions exceed removals by “ten times,” Honey shows a graph of data from ERIC’s website. The wording of the title of the graph calls these “additions and removals instigated by ERIC participation,” as though all of the numbers displayed are actual voters removed from or added to rolls. But ERIC only supplies information about voters who may need to be removed or are eligible to register to vote — state and county election offices determine which are valid and make any changes themselves. In the case of eligible but unregistered voters, the state simply sends a mailer to the identified person informing them of their eligibility, and the voter must take action from there. Honey acknowledges elsewhere in the report that removal and eligible-voter data ERIC provides to states are merely “suggest[ions].”

Her graph also leaves out two other categories of ERIC’s list maintenance recommendations to states. In reality, they’ve recommended roughly 41 million records be updated and identified roughly 57 million voters who may be eligible.

Votebeat performed a more accurate analysis of ERIC’s effect on voter roll additions, using data showing net changes to voter rolls, rather than the number of people who were sent mail.

The EAC’s data — which Honey uses elsewhere in her report, though not for this analysis — shows that there is typically less than 1 percentage point of difference between ERIC and non-ERIC states when it comes to registering new voters.

This figure aligns with academic research on the topic. A study of Pennsylvania’s ERIC mailings, published in 2020, found they resulted in only a 1 percentage point increase in registration.

Elsewhere, Honey’s report relies on real data to make inaccurate conclusions or omits relevant and readily-available context.

For instance, she accurately states that Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s secretaries of state received voter outreach grants from nonprofits dispersing money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Honey then incorrectly claims the grants were given to those states “in order to gain access to data needed to inflate the Democrat voter rolls and drive Democrat turnout.” Honey did not respond to a request to provide evidence of that claim.

The portion of Pennsylvania voters registered as Democrats went down in 2020, as it has every year for more than a decade. Michigan voters do not register by party, so there are no “Democrat voter rolls” there. And a recent study from data scientists at the University of California Los Angeles found that the areas that received grants funded by Zuckerberg saw less than a 0.13 percentage point increase in voter turnout — ultimately significantly fewer votes than would be needed to swing the election even if they all had voted for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Honey also leaves out important context. For example, she quotes a 2021 Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau report which found many duplicate and erroneous voter registrations in the file ERIC sent to that state for voters who should potentially be removed.

Honey quotes this accurately but leaves out other parts of the report that reflect positively on ERIC, such as the state elections office saying ERIC does a better job “identifying individuals whose voter registration records may need to be inactivated or who may have more than one active voter registration record” than it does. Among its conclusions, the report says the state’s voter rolls would be more accurate if it used ERIC’s data more often.

Honey said the issues addressed by the Wisconsin agency were “very different things” than what she investigated in her report, but did not elaborate on why she didn’t include the positive aspects.

Honey’s claims gain traction

Despite the flaws in Honey’s report, it quickly gained traction, making its way across conservative media and into the hands of influential politicians and officials.

“Thank you for reading through this information!” a local Virginia GOP committeewoman wrote about Honey’s report in a March 2023 email to a state representative, expressing “hope” it would be shared with the Virginia state elections board. It ultimately was.

Records obtained by Documented also show that Honey’s influence grew through the help of Mitchell. In June 2022, Mitchell organized the event for secretaries of state in Washington, D.C. Officials from Texas, Wyoming, Louisiana, and West Virginia were scheduled to attend, according to records obtained by Documented, which also show that Mitchell’s group paid for a Texas secretary of state official’s travel to the event. Records obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA show Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was out of office that day for an unspecified “meeting in DC.” Louisiana announced its official withdrawal from ERIC a month later.

As officials and activists took notice of the report, Honey’s work began to be cited by influential outlets and figures in conservative media, including The Federalist.

“Per government watchdog Verity Vote, ERIC doesn’t actually clean states’ voter rolls, but rather inflates them,” the publication wrote in March 2023, using the name of the entity through which Honey puts out her election-related research.

Her work also made appearances in a series of articles critiquing ERIC by Hayden Ludwig, director of policy research at Restoration of America — a conservative Christian non-profit focused on the challenges presented by “the elite,” “Marxist neo-liberals” and “Communist China.”

And Judicial Watch, an influential conservative legal watchdog group, cited it in a white paper in March 2023. “States that do not participate in ERIC had a higher rate of identifying and removing from voter registration rolls individuals who relocated out of a jurisdiction than ERIC member states,” Judicial Watch wrote.

Policymakers took notice of the report as well.

In 2018, Ashcroft, a Republican, said the state’s membership in ERIC “will help affirm voters are eligible and registered in the right location, identify potential duplicate registrations and identify unregistered voters so we can help them get registered.”

But last February, Honey gave Ashcroft a private presentation on her report, emails obtained by Documented and Votebeat/Spotlight PA show.

A month later, Ashcroft announced Missouri’s withdrawal, saying in part that it was because ERIC was “adding names to voter rolls” — language similar to the claims in Honey’s report. Missouri’s number of registered voters increased by less than two percent in the time it was part of ERIC. The state’s Republican state auditor recently criticized Ashcroft for the decision in a report, which cited the benefit of ERIC’s data in maintaining accurate voter rolls. Ashcroft did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Honey’s report was not the sole reason any state withdrew from ERIC. No state election official — even those who met with her or received her report and appear to have adopted some of her language — explicitly cited her research. But her report and advocacy appears to have influenced several states.

In January of last year, Devvie Duke, a member of the Texas GOP and an ERIC task force, said in a Zoom meeting that she had lined up ERIC training with Heather Honey “so we can be informed and productive when we’re writing.” She paused. “Or, going to see our legislators in support of legislation getting rid of ERIC.”

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, who wrote the bill that pulled Texas out of ERIC, participated in that meeting, where he was introduced as “a regular” at the task force’s sessions.

Duke, who did not respond to a request for comment, is currently running for a seat in the Texas state House. Her campaign material claims that it was “through Devvie’s work that Texas terminated its membership” in ERIC, which she called a “liberal voter registration scheme.”

In Virginia, Susan Beals — a former Republican state Senate aide and now the commissioner for the state Department of Elections — also received the report last March from a member of the state House, according to an email obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA. A letter obtained by Virginia Public Media shows that when Beals withdrew from ERIC, some of her reasoning was worded similarly to the contents of the email. Beals did not respond to a request for an interview.

Internal communications from an election integrity network in North Carolina — obtained by Documented and shared with Votebeat and Spotlight PA — show that Honey met with a group of legislators about a bill to prevent the state from joining ERIC, and also met with at least some of members of the state Senate who would later vote for the measure.

And language mirroring Honey’s research has also appeared in the capitol building of her home state, Pennsylvania, where state Sen. Cris Dush (R-Jefferson) said last March that non-ERIC states were doing a better job cleaning voter rolls than ERIC states, though he did not cite any evidence.

Dush did not respond to a request for comment.

Friends in high places, and a new frontier

Honey has certainly been successful in getting her information in front of influential officials in a way her peers have not, forming connections with secretaries of state, their staffs, state lawmakers, U.S. Senate candidates and congressmen. Her influence, therefore, is likely to continue.

For example, she recently gave a talk in Pennsylvania to the Lycoming County Republican Committee, attended by U.S. Rep. Dan Mueser, who called it an “important presentation” on “securing and protecting the voting system.” She also appears to have provided draft language for a bill in June 2021 to state Reps. Seth Grove and Russ Diamond, according to records obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.

Honey also leads a local organization, PA Fair Elections, which hosts weekly Zoom discussions on election issues and organizes activists. Recent meetings have focused on how to advocate post-election hand counts to county commissioners, though some attract public officials, including at least two state representatives, a Commonwealth Court judge, and county commissioners.

Ahead of the 2024 election, her work is expanding beyond ERIC to include research and advocacy about ballots sent to and from voters living overseas, including military voters.

In addition to authoring a report on the subject, which she published in September 2022, she filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of State, with the support of an attorney from the Thomas More Society. It alleged the department was violating federal law by not requiring identification for some overseas voters.

An attorney for Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office, who handled the complaint, dismissed it in November, offering that the complaint was more of an objection to federal law rather than an accusation that existing law was being violated. Honey is now appealing that decision to Commonwealth Court.

She’s also exporting this advocacy to states outside the commonwealth. In August, she gave a presentation on overseas voters to the Virginia coalition affiliated with Mitchell’s election integrity network, according to records reviewed by Documented.

A now-deleted post from the North Carolina–based Asheville Tea Party, whom Honey worked with to contact legislators in that state, shows that she also gave a presentation in April on military and overseas voters at the request of Mitchell.

Meeting notes posted to the Asheville Tea Party’s website indicate Honey explained that her concern was that while people assume the ballots are from military voters, most of them come from overseas citizens, many of whom were likely unverified.

“These newer election officials just rubber-stamp them and don’t do anything to verify,” she said, according to meeting notes. “It’s the non-military that we need to really worry about.”

Honey’s work focused on influencing local election policy also continues.

At the first PA Fair Elections meeting of the year, Honey kicked off the meeting by talking about what changes members needed to push for in their counties, including pressuring election offices to conduct their required post-election audit — a recount of 2% of all ballots — by hand count. It is currently done with a mix of hand counting and machine tabulation.

“There are 104 days till the primary, so these things we are talking about, we are very much hoping to have them in place for the primary so we can work out any kinks,” she told the group of roughly four dozen. “If we can roll them out in the primary, we can hopefully make improvements to them by the general.”

Graphics and data analysis for this story were done using data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey. Specifically, state-level data on the number of reported registrations, voting age population, overall removals, removals due to voter death, removals due to voter moving out of jurisdiction, and new valid registrations were extracted from the 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 datasets. EAVS data should be used and viewed with caution, as it is a voluntary survey and often incomplete or inaccurate.

Data on overall removals, removals due to voter death, removals due to voter moving out of jurisdiction, and new valid registrations was then grouped by each state’s ERIC membership status for a given report period. Those figures were then divided by the aggregate reported registrations for the group of states. Reported registrations are the actual number of registered voters a given jurisdiction reports in response to the survey. The voting age population is an estimate of the number of persons eligible to vote, based on census data.

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Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Jason Armesto — a reporter for The Daily Progress, a newspaper in Virginia — contributed to this report.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization committed to reporting the nuanced truth about elections and voting at a time of crisis in America.

https://www.votebeat.org/pennsylvania/2024/02/12/h...