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Commissioners again discuss voter registration issues

Lancaster County’s board of commissioners. From left: Alice Yoder, Vice Chair Ray D’Agostino and Chair Josh Parsons. (Photo: Tim Stuhldreher)

All three Lancaster County commissioners assured the community Wednesday that the Nov. 5 election will be safe and secure and certified in accordance with applicable law and court rulings.

Beyond that, they stook sharply different approaches during the public comment period that concluded their regular morning meeting. Democrat Alice Yoder was conciliatory, while Republicans Josh Parsons and Ray D’Agostino continued to assail news stories and social media posts about county voter registration and election procedures.

The county’s system has come under intense scrutiny over the past two weeks. Early last week, Parsons and D’Agostino forcefully rebutted accusations that Elections Office staff had provided misleading information regarding voter registration for individuals with active out-of-state registrations. (State guidance says the out-of-state registration should be canceled, but it is not required in advance before a Pennsylvania registration is accepted and processed. Voting in two jurisdictions in the same election is illegal.)

Then, on Friday, the county announced an investigation into roughly 2,500 voter registration applications, a large portion of which showed evidence of fraud, according to District Attorney Heather Adams.

In a statement Wednesday, Adams said detectives worked through the weekend, finding hundreds of fraudulent applications and hundreds more that could not be verified, meaning that the information on them could not be found in police or public databases. When applications did check out, the Elections Office was notified so it could process them, she paid.

“We are actively investigating who is responsible for this, and any speculation at this point is premature,” Adams said.

In a social media post Tuesday about the investigation and a related one in York County, Republican candidate Donald Trump sharply exaggerated what local officials have alleged so far. He did the same at his Allentown rally Tuesday evening, falsely claiming, “In Lancaster, they’ve cheated. We caught them with 2,600 votes.”

At the commissioners’ Wednesday meeting, city resident Ben Cattell Noll asked them if they intend to reach out to the Trump campaign to correct the record.

No, D’Agostino said: “We’re not going to go after every social media post, email, whatever somebody says, simply because it’s being put out there.”

Yoder said in her view, if someone that high-profile is making inaccurate statements about the county, “I would want to be out there saying that it’s not true, and to reinforce what we’ve been saying.”

Noll told the two Republican commissioners he questions whether they can be trusted, saying they have a track record of partisanship and pursuing grievances. The cease-and-desist letter sent to Franklin & Marshall College in connection with the out-of-state registration issue is a case in point, he said, calling it “a misuse of your power and authority.”

Their approach, he said, has led to Lancaster County’s inclusion on a Brookings’ “watchlist” of counties that may try not to certify the upcoming election.

Parsons said the Brookings watchlist is off-base. As grounds for including Lancaster County, it cites the May 2022 primary, when Lancaster, Berks and Fayette counties declined to include undated ballots in their certified election totals until a court order.

The meaning and legality of Pennsylvania’s ballot-dating requirement has been extensively litigated in multiple venues, with conflicting outcomes. Most recently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled 4-3 on jurisdictional grounds to keep the requirement in place. Republicans have fought to keep it, while Democrats say it is an unnecessary technicality.

In the May 2022 primary, Lancaster County was following the law at the time, which was at variance with Department of State guidance, Parsons said. When a judge subsequently ruled in the department’s favor, the county complied. That’s what it always does and will do, he said.

“We’ve literally never, ever, ever shown any propensity to not follow the law when it’s exactly clear or a court has ruled on it,” he said. News reports suggesting otherwise are false and unhelpful, he said.

Then-Democratic County Commissioner John Trescot said at the time that the county had taken the correct position, because the state’s guidance would have required the filing of not one but two sets of certified results, one with the undated ballots, one without.

The two commissioners criticized Votebeat reporter Carter Walker for a May 2023 story that mentioned the undated ballot certification case and implied it could raise future certification concerns, and for tweets he posted on Tuesday saying the same thing. They also continued to berate LNP for its reporting on the out-of-state registration issue and Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt for jumping in.

Noll opened his comments by asking D’Agostino who won the 2020 election. Parsons objected to the question, grumbling, “We’re going to play games about 2020.” He conceded the counts were certified and Biden is president, but neither he nor D’Agostino said explicitly that Biden won.

Commissioner Yoder asked Noll to ask her the same question. “President Joe Biden,” she answered.

In a prepared statement, Yoder mentioned her years as a poll greeter in West Hempfield Township, and the uniformly neighborly comity, courtesy and civic spirit she saw on display each time.

“I expect the same this year,” she said, cautioning against those who would sow doubt or distrust. Elections staff are working tirelessly, she said, and “our Election Day in Lancaster County will be smooth and secure.”