(The Center Square) – Federal authorities are investigating “reports of potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections” that one official labeled “troubling.”
FBI agents from the agency’s Scranton office and the Pennsylvania State Police “have conducted numerous interviews and recovered and reviewed certain physical evidence,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania said in a statement Friday. The district attorney for Luzerne County, Stefanie Salavantis (R), requested the federal investigation, and election officials have cooperated with the probe.
“At this point we can confirm that a small number of military ballots were discarded,” the statement said. “Investigators have recovered nine ballots at this time. Some of those ballots can be attributed to specific voters and some cannot.”
Federal authorities said seven of the nine ballots were cast for President Donald Trump.
Luzerne County election officials resealed the other two ballots before the feds recovered them, and “the contents of those (two) ballots are unknown,” according to the statement.
“It is the vital duty of government to ensure that every properly cast vote is counted,” the statement continued.
In an interview with Politico, Justin Levitt, a constitutional law scholar and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said simply issuing such an announcement about an ongoing investigation was “illegitimate.”
Millions of Americans are expected to vote by mail in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, although the security of the mail-in ballot system has been called into question by political opponents of voting by mail.
“It is really improper for DOJ to be putting out a press release with partial facts,” Politico quoted Levitt as saying. “And it is career-endingly improper to designate the candidate for whom the votes are cast. There is no federal statute on which the identity of the preferred candidate depends.”
In a Sept. 24 letter to Luzerne County Bureau of Elections director Shelby Watchilla, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania David Freed said the “investigation has revealed that all or nearly all envelopes received in the elections office were opened as a matter of course.”
“It was explained to investigators the envelopes used for official overseas, military, absentee and mail-in ballot requests are so similar, that the staff believed that adhering to the protocol of preserving envelopes unopened would cause them to miss such ballot requests,” Freed wrote. “Our interviews further revealed that this issue was a problem in the primary election–therefore a known issue–and that the problem has not been corrected.”
The security of ballots and voting by mail has become a hotly-debated topic this election season due to the recent expansion of the voting by mail framework in Pennsylvania and other states, in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump has suggested that the system may provide opportunities for fraudulent acts to be committed–further politicizing the issue–and changes at the United States Postal Service that have resulted in slower mail delivery have fueled anxiety about whether mailed ballots will be counted.
“These ballots are a horror show,” Trump told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade after news about the Luzerne County investigation by the FBI was first reported. “They were Trump ballots…and they were thrown in a garbage can.”
“This is what’s going to happen, and we’re investigating that,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing that’s going on with these ballots. Who’s sending them, where are they sending them, where are they going, what areas are they going to, what areas are they not going to?”
The Center Square fulfills a need for high-quality, publicly available statehouse and statewide news across the United States. Staffed by professional journalists who engage readers with essential news, data and analysis, The Center Square-Pennsylvania was previously known as Pennsylvania Watchdog and PA Independent.
