In the leadup to the midterm elections, some social media users are claiming ballots have been sent to hundreds of thousands of unverified voters in Pennsylvania.
“Crisis in Pennsylvania – 255,000 unverified new voters sent ballots – candidates better contact their lawyers,” reads the headline of an Oct. 26 article by Gateway Pundit, a conservative website that has repeatedly published false claims about voter fraud.
The article was shared on Facebook nearly 2,000 times in six days, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool. Former President Donald Trump mentioned the claim in a Truth Social post, which accumulated more than 20,000 likes in four days.
But the claim is misleading. The ballots were sent to 255,000 people who were unverified at the time, but that's only because Pennsylvania allows voters to be verified at several different points in the voting process.
Any ballots where a voter's identification hasn't been verified before the election won't be counted, officials said. The number of unverified voters shrunk while the verification process continued leading up to the election, and there were about 7,600 ballot applications still in need of verification as of Oct. 28.
USA TODAY reached out to Gateway Pundit for comment.
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