Here Come the Election Lies

In the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, Trump and the GOP are pushing baseless conspiracies and alleging voter fraud where none exists.

Screenshot courtesy of ABC News

Recent Blue Wall swing state polls by CNN and Marist show Harris gaining ground. There is a widely reported 10 point gender gap in the early vote in the battleground states. And early voting seniors are breaking heavily for Harris in Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Trump.

In response to all of these, and likely some bad internal numbers his campaign is seeing, Trump has shifted to familiar ground: lying brazenly about election fraud. His campaign, with help from the Russians, has made Pennsylvania ground zero for false election fraud claims, signaling he is very worried he is going to lose the state and wants to contest the final count.

Trump has posted that Pennsylvania was “cheating” and called for prosecutions. He has singled out Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a rural region with a big Amish population. “They’re already cheating in Lancaster,” Trump told supporters, “These are cheaters, and today they got caught.” 

His campaign also sued Bucks County, Pennsylvania to extend its in-person absentee voting period, claiming that its attempts to close its doors at the end of the business day on the final day was some kind of fraud, and that Democratic volunteers were impersonating election officials. 

Meanwhile, GOP-led false claims about groups of non-existent voters fed conspiracies across the MAGA world.

It’s important that we set the record straight on all this nonsense. In today’s piece, I’ll walk through each of these claims and debunk them. I’ll also show how Trump may be using these unsupported claims as a false flag to push his lies about election fraud.

Fake registrations in Lancaster and York

On October 30, Trump put out a vague warning to his followers, claiming that “Pennsylvania” was cheating and “getting caught, at large scale never seen before.” He urged his followers to “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES” and demanded, “Law enforcement must act, NOW.”

So what was Trump talking about? I went back and checked. The day before this, Trump had tweeted about an issue discovered in York and Lancaster counties of “THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-in Ballot Applications from a third party group.”

Here’s what we know. Election workers in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, while performing a routine review of voter registrations, discovered as many as 2,500 fraudulent voter registration applications. As NBC News reported,

When reviewing the personal information, identification and signatures listed on the forms, election officials found inaccurate information, signatures that did not match the one they had for the voter on file, and forms seemingly completed by the same individual with the same handwriting.

The application forms were completed by paid canvassers, as part of a “large-scale canvassing operation” dating back to June, District Attorney Heather Adams told reporters on Friday. She added that at least two other counties may have received fraudulent registration applications, too.

The announcement did not say who, if anyone, the District Attorney’s office suspected of submitting the false registrations. Many on the left immediately suspected a well-known GOP operative named Scott Presler, who has been publicly organizing registration drives for the Amish in Lancaster. His efforts were already being blown way out of proportion by fake news posts like this one:

But there aren’t even 180,000 Amish living in Lancaster. There are only 35,000.

It didn’t help that on October 20th, the day before the final day to register to vote in Pennsylvania, Presler posted that they were delivering hundreds of voter registrations to Amish homes in Lancaster:

I should be clear that there is no evidence at this time that Presler is involved in any way with the false registrations. He has issued a denial, claiming that while the fraudulent registrations were turned in a single batch, his organization always turns in registration forms as they register voters. 

To me, it seems silly to think anyone could actually get away with turning in thousands of false registrations all bearing the same handwriting but with signatures that don’t match those on file. This could easily be the work of a single low level paid contractor who wanted to earn more money or to meet some quota, rather than a nefarious plot.

Alternatively, it could be a “false flag” operation, though admittedly this would be quite brazen. By “false flag,” I mean it could be someone intentionally creating false registrations that they know will be identified and investigated, lending credence to the idea that there is widespread vote fraud.

Even if the registrations were not part of some conspiratorial plot, the right certainly is leaning hard into the story and capitalizing on it to sow doubt and confusion. Big accounts, backed up by bot traffic, are posting regularly about it and citing it as evidence that something isn’t right in Pennsylvania, even though the system worked exactly as it’s supposed to work.

The Center for an Informed Public of the University of Washington has been tracking tweets by right-wing influencers and politicians about the false registrations to show how they are influencing the public narrative, including the total number of tweets:

And what are likely fake accounts on Twitter are amplifying the story, saying the same thing in the same way about it. This is clear from a review by one user of the same phrase from Trump, which was then used over and over again by suspicious accounts.

A small sample of the posters also revealed that most were created in 2024 in the same month. Further, 6 out of 12 accounts are known crypto accounts, while 3 out of 12 accounts claim to be real persons whose profiles are AI generated. The thread is a fascinating example of how disinformation spreads through bot traffic.

Trump is also busily leveraging the investigation to claim that there is rampant voter fraud. He doubled down on his claims in an interview with Tucker Carlson, saying “We found a lot of bad votes that happened to be written by the same pen, same signature, same everything.”

But it was Lancaster officials, not the Trump campaign, who identified some 2500 suspicious registrations. And these were not “bad votes” but rather bad registrations. Trump is conflating the two ideas in order to claim voting is somehow tainted, when in fact the bad registrations were discovered and removed by election workers. 

Further, it is hard to see how false registrations of voters would operate to create actual voter fraud on Election Day, unless the same third party could then go back to those same voters and cause them to actually vote, even though they had been registered without their knowledge. That just doesn’t pass the smell test.

Bucks County drama

Not to be outdone by his boss, JD Vance got in on the act, too. As the New York Times reported, Vance claimed that Democratic volunteers were impersonating election officials in Bucks County:

Earlier in the day, Mr. Vance seized on deceptive posts online claiming that Democratic Party volunteers were impersonating election officials at polling sites.

Al Schmidt, who is the Republican Secretary of State in Pennsylvania, pushed back. In his daily news briefing on Thursday, Schmidt calmly rebutted online rumors, including false reports that partisan organizations were impersonating election officials in Allegheny County. These claims had been amplified by Vance, who had cited the reports as evidence of “fraud.” Schmidt made clear that the workers were actually properly identified partisan volunteers who were acting lawfully.

“Criticizing volunteers for properly engaging in permissible electioneering damages our efforts to address the serious issues that can arise from voter intimidation,” Mr. Schmidt said, making no mention of Mr. Vance or any other politician. “True instances should be reported to law enforcement, not irresponsibly shared online.”

The Trump campaign took Bucks County to court, too. It filed a lawsuit this week claiming voters had been improperly turned away on the final day of in-person absentee voting. By way of background, in Pennsylvania, all early voting is done by mail, but you can turn in your mail-in ballots in person, too. There were long lines of people in Bucks County who were attempting to do just that, making it unlikely that the county could process all of them in time before they closed at 5 p.m. on the last day. 

RNC chair Michael Whatley sought to make big political hay out of the suit. “The Trump Vance camp has just filed a huge lawsuit against Bucks County for turning away our voters!” Whatley said to a MAGA crowd during a rally this week. But Bucks County said they were merely trying to stick with business hours and miscommunicated that plan to some people waiting to submit mail ballots.  

A court agreed with the Trump campaign, and it granted two additional days in the critical swing county. This again is not evidence of fraud or even voter suppression, but of a county being told to bend its rules to allow late-arriving voters to cast their mail-in ballots in person.

Sister acts

Finally, there is also a false rumor that the news media had to debunk in person through a pilgrimage to a monastery of Catholic nuns in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The story is this: On October 22, a Republican activist named Cliff Maloney tweeted the following false claim:

BREAKING: a member of the PA CHASE discovered an address in Erie, PA today where 53 voters are registered.

Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there.

We knocked on the door because a Republican mail-in ballot is unreturned. 

Our attorney’s [sic] are reviewing this right now.

We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.

The post, which included a video scroll of all of the names of the residents, has been viewed 2.8 million times. 

ABC News investigated the claim after the nuns who reside at the Mount Saint Benedictine Monastery put out a statement calling out that false claim. A news crew visited the monastery and spoke to some of the women living there. 

“We can confirm: The nuns are real. They live there. All but two are registered voters,” ABC News declared.

The nuns feel they have been swept up in a viral vortex of misinformation. As Sister Stephanie Schmidt told ABC, “This was a blatant lie putting out to the public that was Just. Wrong.” She noted that it was “accusatory of voter fraud” and she wondered if this was “staging for after the election: Look at this! 53 voters registered and nobody lives there!”

As of this writing, Maloney’s false and accusatory tweet remains up, though it has been slapped with community notes.

Trump and the GOP desperate?

The Harris campaign believes all of these bogus election fraud claims and the amplification of false rumors signal weakness from the Trump camp.

“They’re not acting like a campaign that's incredibly confident,” said Harris campaign senior advisor David Plouffe.  “This Pennsylvania temper tantrum is all about Trump, I’m sure, being briefed on early vote numbers and not liking them.”

But that may not be all of it, and two things can be true at once. The Trump campaign may know that the numbers are looking dicier and that is causing Trump to lash out. But he is also paving the way for challenges and claims that the election, once again, was stolen from him if he loses.

That’s why it’s important to get ahead of these stories and be prepared everywhere to rebut them with facts. While such facts may not penetrate the MAGA cult mind, they do have an effect upon more moderate and centrist voters who are growing tired of the same unfounded, sore loser type claims from the GOP.  Getting the truth out there matters, and the quicker we do so, the stronger our systems and safeguards will be.