During the last full week before Election Day, Donald Trump has turned his attention to Pennsylvania. In addition to making scheduled campaign stops in Allentown and Drexel Hill, he began to float unfounded claims of voter fraud in the state, a clear signal of Trump’s planned post-election strategy to declare victory no matter what.
“Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” he wrote on TruthSocial on Wednesday.
In the days prior, Trump made specific claims about two counties in the state, claiming that officials in York and Lancaster counties received thousands of fraudulent documents, such as ballots. He ended his post by calling for legal intervention. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA??? Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!! WOW!!!,” he wrote Tuesday.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Lancaster County officials did flag batches of 2,500 voter registrations for irregularities. The forms, submitted by a canvassing organization, are also not official ballots as Trump has claimed. As for York County, the county commissioner confirmed that they did receive “thousands of election-related materials from a third-party organization” and are currently reviewing those submissions with plans to report any discovered fraud.
Trump has also taken aim at Bucks County, the crucial suburban Philadelphia county, as voters had to contend with long lines as they tried to cast their on-demand mail ballots ahead of the Tuesday deadline. Unlike other states, Pennsylvania doesn’t have a typical early-voting process. In addition to the usual mail ballot procedure, voters have the opportunity to apply for a mail ballot in person, fill it out, and submit it during the course of one visit to their county election office. Voters attempting this at the Bucks County administration office on Tuesday, the final day that the option was available, waited for hours in lines that wound around the block.
Though officials told CBS News that every waiting voter who was in line by 5 p.m. received a ballot application, the Trump campaign has claimed voters were ultimately turned away.
During Trump’s Allentown rally Tuesday, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley claimed that the campaign intends to take legal action against the county. “I’m proud tonight to tell you that the Trump-Vance campaign has just filed a huge lawsuit against Bucks County for turning away our voters,” he said, per the local NBC affiliate. On Wednesday, a judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, extending the deadline for Bucks County voters to apply for a mail-in ballot until Friday.
Pennsylvania was a target for Trump’s debunked election-fraud claims during his 2020 campaign, but none of the lawsuits looking into the state’s electoral process in that cycle ultimately panned out. Governor Josh Shapiro, who served as the state’s attorney general during that time, pushed back against the Trump campaign’s allegations and said the former president is trying to revive his same strategy from the previous campaign.
“He is now trying to use the same playbook to stoke chaos, but hear me on this: We will again have a free and fair, safe and secure election — and the will of the people will be respected,” Shapiro said.
