Former Pennsylvania secretary of commonwealth says GOP election lawsuits fuel divisions

In early October, six Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the validity of ballots cast by U.S. citizens abroad, including military service members stationed overseas. U.S. Judge Christopher C. Conner for the Middle District of Pennsylvania dismissed the lawsuit on Oct. 29, but an election expert said winning the suit was never the goal. 

Kathy Boockvar, who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth during the 2020 election, told the Pennsylvania Independent she believes the lawsuits were motivated by a desire to tear down faith in the election process.

“They waited literally till the election was in process to file a lawsuit that could have been filed over 10 years ago. And they did it, of course, focused on swing states rather than doing it everywhere, which tells you, also, something about the motive here,” said Boockvar, who serves as a member of the nonpartisan organization Committee for Safe and Secure Elections and the president of Athena Strategies, LLC, an elections consultancy.

The suit was filed by Pennsylvania Republican Reps. Guy Reschenthaler, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, and Scott Perry, all of whom are running for reelection on Nov. 5.

It accused Pennsylvania of violating a 1986 federal law governing overseas voting, alleging the state wasn’t verifying the identities of people applying for absentee ballots abroad. The lawmakers asked the court to force election officials to set aside and not count absentee ballots received from overseas voters until the officials had verified their identities. Similar suits filed in North Carolina and Michigan were also recently thrown out.

This is the first time, Boockvar said, that she has heard of challenges to the validity of the processes by which people covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act cast their votes, and she stressed the importance of ensuring that the voting rights of service members who put their lives on the line for their country are not violated.

“There’s a reason why these laws were created to give extra opportunity for the men and women serving our country and their families and other citizens overseas,” Boockvar said. “We have decided as a country that we value these citizens so much and recognize that the barriers they face in voting are worth extra protections.”

In another case, a group of activists in Pennsylvania filed challenges to applications for mail-in ballots submitted by voters whose new mailing addresses do not match those listed with their names in a U.S. Postal Service database. 

According to reporting from Votebeat and Spotlight PA, 191 challenges were filed in Bucks County and 212 challenges were filed in Chester County. 

On Oct. 3, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania issued a letter to all 67 counties alerting them that it’s illegal to reject a mail-in ballot application over address discrepancies. Any citizen in the state is allowed to receive a mail-in ballot as long as they are registered to vote. 

Republicans in the state also asked the courts to disqualify mail-in ballots for which voters had made mistakes in signing or dating the return envelope or had failed to use a secrecy envelope. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Oct. 31 ruled that voters in the state whose mail-in ballots have been disqualified can vote a provisional ballot on Election Day. The Republican National Committee has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case and decide it by Nov. 1.

Boockvar said it’s clear Republicans are laying the groundwork to challenge the results of this year’s elections if their preferred candidates lose.

“This has been a deliberate, calculated effort by domestic extremists to tear down faith in our electoral process,” Boockvar said, adding that it reminds her of what happened after the election in 2020. 

To respond to questions about voter fraud, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania government website has a page that fact-checks claims and misinformation about elections.

“The conversation that we should be having is, how do we make sure that all of those overseas citizens and members of the military can exercise that right?” Boockvar said. “And instead, we’ve got these domestic extremist actors who are using [legal challenges] to intentionally fuel divide, fuel distrust, and that’s the kind of thing that we expect to see in dictatorships, in war-torn countries. That’s not who we are in America. We’re better than that, and we should start acting like it.”