By Daniel Payne
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania so far this year have been accepted at almost 30 times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers, raising potential questions in a state in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden is maintaining a lead of just several thousand votes.
A county-by-county review by Just the News of accepted and rejected mail-in ballots throughout the state of Pennsylvania show that, when added up, the state only rejected 951 of 2,614,011 mail-in ballots this year, or a rate of 0.03%.
That is significantly less than the historical rate of mail-in ballot rejection, which generally hovers around 1%. For first-time mail-in voters the rate can jump as high as 3%.
In 2016, the state saw about 266,208 mail-in ballots; just under 1% of them, 2,534, were rejected, roughly in line with historical expectations, according to the 2016 Election Administration and Voting Survey.
At that historical rate of rejection, around 26,000 mail-in ballots would be rejected from this year’s final Pennsylvania tally. Such numbers would not have been unexpected: Last month, for instance, the Bucks County Courier Times estimated that, based on predicted vote-by-mail turnout, around 28,000 Pennsylvanians might have had their ballots pulled, rather than the 951 that were ultimately dumped.
The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment via email and phone on Friday afternoon regarding the abnormally low rejection rate.
JW… We’ve proven repeatedly – because we’ve been winning in court to clean up voter lists – that the lists across America are filthy in terms of having more people on the rolls than are eligible to vote. And those people, you can be sure, are going to be to be the groups getting some of these ballots.
Our most recent research in September revealed that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters!
Well, gosh, after somebody spent all that time sitting down and filling all those ballots out, it would be rude to reject them.