Former President Donald Trump amplified a debunked claim Tuesday that 250,000 “unverified” ballots were mailed out to Pennsylvania voters, the latest in a string of unsubstantiated fraud claims from Trump, but the accusation–spread by conservative media platforms–is based on a misleading interpretation of Pennsylvania’s voter registration rules.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump posted an article from conservative site Just The News that suggested the Pennsylvania Department of State sends out mail-in ballots without verifying voters’ identities, citing a report by the election watchdog group Verity Vote.
“Here we go again! Rigged election!” Trump wrote to his 4.43 million followers on Truth Social above a link to the article.
The article references a letter sent by 12 Republican state lawmakers to Pensylvania’s Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman last week claiming some counties “count the ballots without the ID from the voter,” while others “fix the invalid ID in the system.”
The claims are false: Pennsylvania voters must show proof of identification to cast their ballots in person in Pennsylvania or to apply for a mail-in ballot, according to the Department of State, and in the “vast majority” of cases, their identities are verified automatically by a system that cross-references other state databases, such as the Department of Transportation’s license directory, Chapman said in a letter to Republican lawmakers.
When voters’...
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