Pennsylvania Republican party embraces election fraud conspiracy theory around 2023 state Supreme Court race

It started on election night, in Cambria County, with a simple formatting error. 

A county elections worker uploaded an improperly formatted file to the state website where unofficial vote counts are posted as they come in. This human error resulted in wildly incorrect results. For about a half hour, vote totals that far exceeded the number of registered voters in the rural Western Pennsylvania county were posted online for anyone to see.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said it worked with Cambria County officials to correct the mistake. But for election denial group Audit The Vote PA, the rising and falling vote counts were proof that someone was rigging the state Supreme Court race for the Democrat.

Audit The Vote PA emerged after the 2020 election, founded on the false assertion that voter fraud swung the presidential election to Joe Biden. After this year’s election, the group posted a video showing vote returns in the Supreme Court race changing dramatically on election night. That video was then featured on a popular rightwing blog and shared on social media. Soon, the Pennsylvania Republican Party wrote to demand answers from the state’s top election official.  

“On Election night, November 7, 2023, it was widely observed that statewide vote totals decreased significantly, numerous times,” wrote Pa. GOP executive director Angela Nielsen Alleman in a Nov. 17 letter to Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Republican appointed by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro.  

“Many voters are expressing questions and concerns about these irregularities,” Nielsen Alleman wrote in the letter, which LNP | LancasterOnline obtained through an open records request. “In the interest of transparency and voter confidence, we are requesting credible explanation(s) for these events.”

These sentiments were posted to social media and were widely discussed among some Republicans across the state. The result: Once again, the outcome of a hard-fought statewide race that resulted in a loss for the conservative GOP candidate was being called into question, revealing that the gears of election denial continue to turn nearly three years after election fraud lies fueled the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. 

While some Republicans say the Department of State needs to answer for the election night formatting error, others see the GOP’s letters and posts as evidence of a reckless willingness to dabble in election denialism with the 2024 presidential election on the horizon.

“The risks of unchecked disinformation are serious and clear,” said Ari Mittleman, executive director of Keep Our Republic, a group co-founded by former Pennsylvania Republican Gov. Tom Ridge that aims to protect and strengthen the voting system. “Based on what happened after the 2020 election, it should be easy to recognize that this fueling of suspicion and distrust in our elections by government officials and political leaders can lead to more violence, more political upheaval, and even economic uncertainty for the country.”

Election night returns

Democrat Dan McCaffery beat Republican Carolyn Carluccio by more than 200,000 votes in the state Supreme Court race. Carluccio, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, conceded her loss on election night, and has not publicly expressed any doubts about the election. 

The Department of State, meanwhile, has provided a detailed explanation for why unofficial election night results changed. 

On election night, the error in Cambria County made it appear that Carluccio got 469,400 votes, the department said. Her Democratic rival, McCaffery, appeared to get 166,300. This, in a county with only 84,000 registered voters, was a “clearly absurd” result.

 “In this case, the record was improperly formatted, so we had to take it down,” Schmidt said. “And whenever you take down a file, it obviously results in fluctuations.”

Input errors like this one aren’t unheard of, Schmidt said. Two other counties made small processing mistakes that night that were quickly caught. (The department declined to say which counties). These temporary errors are why he stresses that election night returns are not official.

“I think it’s important to always ask questions, and we should never be dismissive when members of the public or other organizations, regardless of their agenda, ask questions,” Schmidt said. “The difference is when those questions are asked not to seek an answer, and not to seek clarity, but rather to undermine confidence in election results, simply by asking questions, based on facts that are untrue.”

Votes ‘removed’

Audit The Vote PA’s video, labeled, “350K In-Person votes REMOVED,”, shows a series of charts on a computer screen that prominently displays the Department of State’s logo. 

In a nearly hour-long follow-up video posted Nov. 25, Audit the Vote PA leader Toni Shuppe detailed the group’s struggle to get people to pay attention. 

Initially, the group contacted Carluccio’s office, Shuppe said, but the Republican judge was not interested, nor were other Republicans the group contacted. 

 Only after a social media account with more than 100,000 followers shared the video, Shuppe said, did it draw interest from The Gateway Pundit. The website, popular with conservatives, has been frequently flagged by fact-checking organizations as a source of false and misleading information.

On Nov. 16, The Gateway Pundit ran a story headlined, “How Do They Explain This? Video Shows 386,151 Votes REMOVED from GOP Supreme Court Candidate’s Totals in PA Where She Ended Up Losing by 207,237.” 

The story got more than 4 million views on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Shuppe said. 

One day later, the Pennsylvania Republican Party sent its first letter to Schmidt. 

Schmidt said that by using the Department of State logo, Audit the Vote PA’s video misleads viewers who may think the computer screen shown comes from his agency. 

“It is something that is manufactured, and obviously done in an attempt to undermine confidence in elections, where there is a very simple explanation.” 

That explanation doesn’t satisfy Shuppe. 

“Without a proper investigation, we won’t know if this is something to worry about or not,” Shuppe said in an email. “The only way to restore public confidence in the outcome of our elections is to have as much transparency in the process as possible.”

State GOP executive director Nielson Alleman didn’t respond to requests for comment. But in her second letter to the Department of State, she said she wasn’t satisfied with its answer.

“Respectfully, the Department’s response is troubling and begs many questions,” Nielsen Alleman wrote. “The response assigns fault to the counties, when it’s the Department’s responsibility to prevent incorrectly formatted submissions from being published.”

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Republicans voice concerns

Republican state Sen. Cris Dush chairs the state government committee, which he said oversees the Department of State. Dush, who represents five rural counties in central and northern Pennsylvania, said he’s aware of the state GOP’s concerns and the Department of State’s response. 

“I understand human errors can occur, but it’s perfectly legitimate to ask questions about them, and we should get answers on what exactly happened,” Dush said. “Even if there’s nothing unusual here, the Department needs to be more transparent with the public. If they remove election returns, they should issue a public notice explaining why.” 

Dush said he’s asked for a tour of the Department’s operations and supports legislator access to the department on election night “to enhance the integrity and public confidence in the process.” He said authorities need to closely monitor mail-in ballots and drop boxes and increase inspection standards for voting machines. 

 “The bottom line is that every voter should be verified, every ballot secured, and every voting machine inspected and verified,” Dush said. “Until these issues are resolved, there will be doubts about the process, and we owe it to the voters to fix that.”

Republican state Rep. Tom Mehaffie of Dauphin County said he hadn’t heard from the state party on the issue. Mehaffie, a moderate who has been at odds with the GOP before, said Dauphin County’s elections administration has been stellar. 

Still, he understands why people have questions. In addition to expanding mail-in voting starting with the 2020 primary election, much of the state adopted new voting machines in 2019.  

“So I think in the mindset of some, if you’re not close to the process, people are always apprehensive of the new way of doing things,” Mehaffie said. “Anytime you make big sweeping changes, I think that’s a concern.”

Mehaffie said he supports voter ID legislation to increase voter trust. His own proposal to expand voter ID requirements failed to gain traction this year.

Others in the party declined to respond to LNP’s questions. House Republican Leader Bryan Cutler of Drumore Township didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Republican state Rep. Tom Jones of East Donegal Township also didn’t respond to requests, though he raised the issue at a Dec. 1 public meeting with constituents in Elizabethtown. 

“Say, for instance, this judicial race, right?” Jones said. “Where the in-person vote count dropped, was up here and then it dropped. And everybody started saying, ‘Wait, why did that drop? Why did this person’s vote count drop?’ Well, was it a clerical error, was it a reporting error? Yes, it was. What systems can be put in place, what safety checks can be put in place to make sure that that doesn’t happen?”

‘Unfortunate and even dangerous’

At the pro-democracy group Keep Our Republic, Mittleman noted that conspiracy theories are nothing new. What’s more troubling is the recent trend of people in power “irresponsibly priming the pump” by sharing assertions that they know are false.

“Elected leaders and those in positions of authority have a choice to make,” Mittleman said. “They can either feed the conspiracies or they can do the responsible thing by focusing on the facts and assuaging voters’ concerns. Spreading unfounded conspiracies because it fits a political narrative is unfortunate and even dangerous.”

The group has enlisted dozens of former elected and appointed officials —  Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett serves on the group’s Pennsylvania advisory council — in an effort to communicate this message to those in power.   

Mittleman urged lawmakers and party leaders to show people that they can trust election results — and to hone a “healthy skepticism” for wild claims of voter fraud circulating online.

For Schmidt, who will oversee Pennsylvania’s election next year, the upcoming election won’t be his first time under intense scrutiny. The Republican was a city commissioner serving on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in November 2020 — when President Donald Trump called him out by name for refusing to go along with his plan to reject the election results, leading to death threats.

To him, Audit the Vote PA’s allegations are not a legitimate concern. He said his main interest is to make sure that every eligible voter can register, and every registered voter can cast their vote and have it counted.

“I am and have always been a big advocate for transparency — and there are dangers that go along with that,” Schmidt said. “And one of those dangers is that bad faith actors exploit things like this in a way to undermine confidence in democracy when they’re easily explainable and are really not of great concern.”

This reporter’s work is funded by the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund. For more information, or to make a contribution, please visit lanc.news/supportlocaljournalism.