Report: Voting Machines In Pennsylvania County Rejecting Republican Ballots, Concerns Over Fold On Ballots
According to a recent report, several election machines in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, were refusing ballots as voters went to the polls on Tuesday to vote in several local races.
Several precincts were having trouble scanning bar codes on all ballots, according to the Fayette County Bureau of Elections, and several voters informed KDKA that their Republican ballots were not being accepted.
According to Chris Varney, an elections judge, the problem was originally thought to concern all ballots, but officials instead discovered it only impacted Republican ballots.
About the fact that attendance for off-year elections is typically low, George Rattay, chairman of the Fayette County Democratic Party, expects a participation of 20% to 25% due to local interest in the school board races.
“There’s a lot of candidates running,” Rattay said of the races
“That tells me people are concerned and interested in what’s going on in the schools,” Rattay also stated.
The chairman of the Fayette County Republican Party, Bill Kozlovich, expressed Rattay’s aspirations for a large vote, concentrating his emphasis on the judicial races.
“We’ve got to get good judge candidates in,” he added, maintaining that more Republicans should head the county’s row offices.
Over the last six months, other races around the nation, especially those in the 2020 contest, have been scrutinized.
Folds In Ballots Could Be The Source Of Discrepancies
In contrast to the Maricopa County audit of Arizona’s 2020 presidential election results, an audit committee in Windham, New Hampshire, believes ballot folds could be the cause of discrepancies in the state’s 2020 election results.
“Something we strongly suspect at this juncture, based on various evidence, is that in some cases, fold lines are being interpreted by the scanners as valid votes,” said independent auditor Mark Lindeman, according to WMUR.
More from WMUR:
“Auditors said the scanners could be interpreting the fold lines as a vote when they go through a “vote target,” or a candidate’s name on the ballot. They said a lot of Windham’s ballots appear to have fold lines across the target of a Democratic state representative candidate.”
“Wherever the fold happened to be was, I guess, most commonly through my name,’ said the candidate, Kristi St. Laurent.”
“Auditors said that could explain why St. Laurent lost 99 votes in the hand recount last year, while Republican candidates gained votes.”
“Because if someone voted for all four Republican candidates and the ballot happened to have its fold line going through St. Laurent’s target, then that might be interpreted by the machines as an overvote, which would then subtract votes from each of those four Republican candidates,” said auditor Philip Stark. “Conversely, if there were not four votes already in that contest by the voter, a fold line through that target could have caused the machine to interpret it as a vote for St. Laurent.”
