A while back I wrote these words: “The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania certified its 2020 election despite the undisputed fact that it had recorded 202,000 more ballots cast than voters.”

Recently, that statement was challenged by someone who made this comment: “Says who?”

The comment is snarky but fair.  My declaration warrants an in-depth explanation, so here it is.

The Analysis

Pennsylvania has a unique voter registration system, called SURE.  Like every other voter registration system, the SURE system comprises all legally registered voters in the state.  However, it also includes a subcategory of registered voters: the ones who actually voted in the last election (in this case, the 2020 election).

Because of that special subcategory (registered voters who actually voted), it is possible to compare the total ballots cast in the 2020 election to the total voters who participated in that election.  The numbers must match because there has to be a one-to-one relationship between voters and ballots.  If parity does not exist, something is wrong.

Verity Vote (V.V.) is a Pennsylvania data analysis firm headed by Heather Honey.  For the 2020 election, V.V. prepared a careful and detailed comparison of voters who participated in the election vs. ballots cast.  Here are the V.V. findings:

• When PA certified its election on November 24, 2020, there were about 202,000 more ballots cast than identifiable voters.  In other words, there was a large voter deficit.
• In late January 2021, when the 67 PA counties finally posted all voter information into the SURE registration system, there was still a voter deficit — about 121,000.

Let’s examine Verity Vote’s analysis in greater detail. Starting in October 2020, during the early voting period, V.V. purchased weekly updates to the SURE registration system.  Those were purchased from the PA Department of State.  V.V. kept buying the updates every week until February 2021, and each weekly update revealed the cumulative number of registered voters at that point in time.

When PA certified its election (November 24, 2020), Verity Vote could see that there were 202,000 fewer voters than ballots.  How?  It had the exact number of voters based on its analysis of the SURE weekly updates.  V.V. also knew the total number of ballots that were cast, based on the reported votes, adjusted by overvotes, undervotes, and write-in votes.  (Take my word for it: that is the correct procedure.)

After being challenged by Republican legislators in late December 2020, the PA Department of State issued a terse communication that acknowledged a discrepancy but dismissed its importance.  The Department implied that it was a mere timing matter that would be resolved when all 67 counties finally posted voter information into the SURE system.  However, this was not the case.

When the last PA counties finally posted information into the SURE registration system (at the end of January 2021), V.V. determined that there remained a voter deficit of 121,000.  Using my audit experience, I extensively tested the V.V. analysis, and I found it to be logical and completely accurate.  A voter deficit existed, and the election should not have been certified.

The exact amount is not entirely clear because, magically, 30,000 more voters materialized (without explanation) six months after the election.  Yes, the number of voters had grown by the time PA issued its “2020 General Election Report” on May 14, 2021.  That is the reason I reported a deficit of just 90,000 in my book, Debunked.  Although I suspected that the 30,000 increase in voters was a “plug” entry, I generously assumed that it was some sort of legitimate error correction made by PA.  Either way, however, the voter deficit exceeded Biden’s winning margin.

The Law

Now let’s examine this problem from a legal vantage point, because it appears that laws were broken in Pennsylvania.

PA Code Section 3154 (b) indicates that a precinct or voting district cannot certify its results unless the relevant county investigates any significant excess of votes over voters.  When PA certified its election, however, there was a statewide voter deficit of 202,000.  Therefore, there had to be several precincts with voter deficits.  That simple mathematical truth tells us that Section 3154 (b) was violated.

In addition, there is administrative guidance that was issued by the PA Department of State on September 11, 2020 (version 1.0).  That guidance requires counties to scan voter information into the SURE registration system on a daily basis.  Here are the specific instructions with regard to the counties, which process the mail-in votes:

County boards of elections should record the receipt of absentee and mail ballots daily in the SURE system. To record a ballot as returned, the staff should scan the correspondence ID barcode on the outside of the envelope.

The necessity of this process is obvious.  If a ballot is cast on Monday, but the envelope is not scanned into the registration system until Tuesday, what happens if it turns out the voter is not really registered?  All identifying information is on the envelope — not the ballot.  For that reason, the ballot that was cast cannot be retrieved.

Incredibly, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar did not seem to grasp this basic fact.  Instead, she saw certification as a simple counting procedure:

It is however the vote counts certified by the counties, not the uploading of voter histories into the SURE system, that determines the ultimate certification of an election[.]

No, Madam Secretary: The ultimate certification is determined by the vote count of legally registered voters.  If you are unable to identify those legally registered voters — even three months after the election — something is very wrong, and probably illegal.

Those are the facts, and here is some theory.  Perhaps this is what happened in the crooked state of Pennsylvania.  Trump was leading by nearly 700,000 votes right after the November 3 election, and there was probably panic in Harrisburg, PA.  The folks down there had to certify their election in just three weeks, and, my God!  What would happen if Trump still had more votes than Biden on the day of certification?

For that reason, I believe that the people in Harrisburg cast all caution to the wind.  They decided to jam the system with every ballot and validate the voter registrations later.  However, when they finally tried to match voters to registration records, they could not do it.  Why?  Perhaps many of the voters were phony.  Maybe these ballots were some of the 275,000 harvested ballots reported by True the Vote in the movie 2000 Mules.

But there is nothing to worry about because the PA Department of State is staffed by Democrats, in a Democrat state, within a country run by Democrats.  Therefore, the FBI won’t be busting in doors, and nobody will be charged with fraud or malfeasance.  In fact, hardly anyone will ever hear of this fraud.  But you heard it here.

Joe Fried is an Ohio-based CPA who has performed and reviewed hundreds of certified financial audits.  He is the author of the book Debunked? and a new book called How Elections Are Stolen.  It outlines 23 problems that must be fixed before the 2024 elections.  More information can be found at https://joefriedcpa.substack.com (Joe’s free Substack account).

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.