Last Updated on October 21, 2020
The 2020 battleground state of Pennsylvania has rejected over a quarter of a million mail-in ballot requests because of a poorly designed application process that, in the end, sees no ballots cast.
Pennsylvania, one of the critical must win states and a state that no Democrat has won the White House without, has rejected over 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots because voters failed to understand they had previously requested one.
Voting officials blame the enormous number of rejections primarily on duplicate requests initiated by voters who applied for General Election mail-in ballots without knowing they had already applied for those election ballots during the June primary elections.
Over 90 percent of the applications were thrown out as duplicates, voting authorities tallied, because applicants for mail-in ballots for the June 2 State Primary Election didn’t understand they had checked a box to receive ballots for the General Election as well.
Many Pennsylvania election administrators are casting blame on activist groups who while attempting to mobilize voters to the ballot box inundated voters with mail-in ballot applications leading to a large volume of duplicate requests.
More than 370K Pennsylvania mail-in ballot applications, many of them duplicates, rejected: report https://t.co/zrLShTi2CP
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 16, 2020
Thousands of ballots in counties across Pennsylvania have been affected:
- Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) tossed more than 49,000
- Armstrong County has turned back 25 percent of 5,400 applications
- Chester County found 1 in 5 of 113,000 to be a duplicate
- Montgomery County has rejected 32,000 (18 percent)
- Philadelphia has rejected almost 49,000 applications.
Pennsylvania is one of the most sought-after states in the November 3, 2020 General Election. President Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,292 votes. Six million votes were cast. The victory margin for the President was less than one percentage point.
