Mail ballots are being sent to voters with a not-verified status in Pennsylvania. Guidance and directives from the PA Department of State instruct counties to register and mail ballots to voters who provide invalid ID or no ID. Counties must attempt to obtain and verify identification which is likely to end in crisis as described in this report.
Update:
The Pennsylvania Department of State provided a response to fifteen Pennsylvania legislators about the Not Verified Issue. The letter spends five paragraphs confirming the laws as described in the report below.
The DoS further suggests that their guidance was not contradictory; it clearly was contradictory, their gaslighting aside. The confusion created by DoS communications is demonstrated by the lack of uniformity in handling the verification process as reported by the counties.
They DoS alleges that the report claimed that 240,000 will not be verified. The report makes no such claim. In fact, the report anticipates that many will be verified, and points out the difficulty in having to do so in order to comply with the law.
The DoS wrote in a response to the legislature that not all verifications must be performed by the counties because they have an alternative process by which some NV applications can be verified. What records exists for this process?
The DoS does not have a mechanism to update the Not Verified designation and cannot communicate how an application was verified. Therefore, the 240,000 applications that are designated NV, regardless of how many are subsequently verified, will remain NV. More importantly, little transparency exists for this process.
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