Keystone Today

A 40,000-plus vote discrepancy in Pennsylvania, discovered by the nonpartisan Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), could be the subject of Senate hearings, which began last week, into the 2020 general elections and 2021 primary elections.

Voter Reference Foundation, LLC, is a subsidiary of Restoration Action, Inc., which is a conservative political action organization.

Jason Thompson, spokesman for Senate Republican Caucus, told Keystone Today that he expects that the discrepancy “would be the sort of thing the investigation could delve into a little deeper, but it would probably be premature for anyone who is part of the investigation to comment on that until we have time to investigate that specific claim for ourselves.”

Pennsylvania Sen. Jake Corman | stock photo

The 41,503-discrepancy uncovered by VRF voters was between the ballots cast in the 2020 general elections and the number of votes per the state's official canvass.

Gina Swoboda, VRF’s executive director, said it has yet to determine the reason for the discrepancy.  

"It is important to understand that we are publishing official county and state voting records," Swoboda, a former Arizona elections official under two administrations, told Keystone Today. "Basic accounting principles suggest the numbers we are comparing should match, and they don't. We need to get to the bottom of why that is the case."

A call to the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees the state’s elections, was not returned.

On Wednesday, the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, which is holding hearings into the elections, issued subpoenas to the Department of State to get what Senate President Jake Corman (R-Bellefonte) said was “critical information… as part of the ongoing investigation into the state’s election system.”

The committee is looking for partial Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, how each voter cast a ballot and when those voters last cast a ballot before this election.

“When we receive this information from the Department of State, every necessary step will be taken to ensure it is completely secure, including making any vendor personnel sign nondisclosure agreements to make sure the data are protected under penalty of law,” Corman said, according to his website. “We are not going to leave this information vulnerable, like the Wolf administration during their contact tracing data breach earlier this year.”

In Pennsylvania, VRF compared the number of voters reported on voter registration lists collected in early 2021 to the number of ballots cast per the states' official canvasses, certified in December 2020.

The discrepancy could be even higher than 41,503, Swoboda said, if VRF "didn't count" 15,309 voters whose records were missing either the correct voting date or method of voting on the registration list. The VRF guessed that those voters cast ballots in 2020, but the records are not conclusive.

The largest discrepancies were found in Allegheny (6,413), Philadelphia (5,747), and Delaware (4,869) counties.