Mail-in ballots are displayed during a processing demonstration on September 30 at the Bucks County Board of Elections office in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. More than 4,000 mail-in ballots have been submitted across Pennsylvania, mostly against out-of-state voters.

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PHILADELPHIA – Thousands of last-minute challenges to voters’ ballots, along with baseless claims from former President Donald Trump about an investigation into suspicious voter registration forms, are adding pressure on Pennsylvania county officials in the final hours before Election Day.

Pennsylvania has more electoral votes (19) than any other presidential swing state, and the major parties have been engaged in a series of legal battles over election rules in recent weeks.

Officials in 14 counties reported receiving more than 4,000 challenges last Friday, which was the deadline for challenging an absentee voter’s eligibility, according to Matt Heckel, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State.

The counties that received challenges include Allegheny, Beaver, Bucks, Center, Chester, Clinton, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lehigh, Lycoming and York counties.

On Monday, local officials dismissed all 354 lawsuits in south-central Pennsylvania during an emergency hearing, county spokesman Greg Monskie confirmed.

The move comes after 212 challenges in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester County, the first to hold a hearing to review the challenges, were dismissed or withdrawn last week.

Also in Lancaster County, local officials confirmed Monday that most of the approximately 2,500 voter registration forms they identified as suspect last month have been found to be overboard. So far, election officials have confirmed that 17% are fraudulent and 26% remain under investigation, Ray D’Agostino, a Republican county commissioner, said at a meeting of the board of elections for the county, home to more than 366,000 registered voters. .

Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, confirmed last week that her office is working with a total of four counties, including Berks, Monroe and York, to investigate the sources of fraudulent forms. Henry’s office emphasized that “safeguards” built into the way counties register eligible voters thwarted these efforts to corrupt voter registration lists.

Yet at a campaign rally on Sunday in Lancaster County, Trump made the baseless claim that local officials there had found “2,600 ballots” filled out by “the same hand.” On his social media platform, the Republican presidential candidate has claimed without evidence that “cheating” is occurring “on a massive scale” in Pennsylvania. Many election observers say the Trump campaign is laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the swing state’s election results.

Challenges to mail-in voting by right-wing activists and a sitting Republican member of the Pennsylvania Senate are also raising concerns among many election observers.

In a statement, Heckel said “massive bad faith challenges” to absentee ballots were filed across the state. The vast majority – approximately 3,700 challenges – are aimed at U.S. citizens living abroad who are registered to vote in federal elections in Pennsylvania under the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

A smaller group that received a handful of counties in late October challenged the whereabouts of registered voters in the U.S., based in part on change-of-address forms they filed with the U.S. Postal Service. Data from these forms, All Voting is Local and other voting rights groups say, are often part of flawed methodologies for mass voter challenges.

“These challenges are based on theories that courts have repeatedly rejected and appear to be two separate, coordinated efforts to undermine confidence in the Nov. 5 election,” Heckel said.

Last week, officials in Chester County, the suburb west of Philadelphia, rejected more than 180 challenges to domestic voters filed by Diane Houser, a county resident who said she worked with a group called PA Fair Elections as part of an “over statewide effort.” .” During a three-hour hearing, Houser ultimately withdrew 29 objections after registered voters — including a law enforcement officer and a spouse of a military service member — pushed back with proof of their current residence in the county. Seconds after Houser’s attorney, Meaghan Wagner, raised the possibility of appealing the decision by Chester County officials, Houser said she would not appeal.

PA Fair Elections is also part of Republican-led efforts challenging the eligibility of overseas voters, including military members, in Pennsylvania, as well as the swing states of Michigan and North Carolina. Judges dismissed two of the three lawsuits, including a federal case led by a group of U.S. House Republicans from Pennsylvania. After two lower courts in North Carolina denied their request, the Republican National Committee is now asking the state Supreme Court to order that some out-of-state voters’ returned ballots be set aside and not counted until their eligibility can be confirmed.

Bucks County, a politically purple suburb of Philadelphia, received nearly 1,200 ballots against out-of-state voters, the most of any county. All of these challenges were filed about 15 minutes before last week’s deadline by Pennsylvania state Sen. Jarrett Coleman, who represents a district in Bucks and Lehigh counties, county spokesman Jim O’Malley said in an email .

Coleman did not immediately respond to NPR’s multiple requests for comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the effort not only wastes public resources but also jeopardizes the voting rights of overseas citizens who are eligible to vote in federal elections in the district where they last lived.

“Challenging these voters based solely on their status as federal voters of the UOCAVA is not an appropriate use of the challenge process,” wrote Witold Walczak, the legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and Ari Savitzky of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a public letter to the Pennsylvania Provincial Attorneys. “The challengers may disagree with Congress’s determination to extend federal voting rights to these American citizens (and with the past five decades of uninterrupted compliance with federal law on this issue across the country).”

Officials are trying to notify all overseas voters whose eligibility is in question before deciding whether to allow them to cast their ballots, and it is unclear how quickly they can complete the process. Some counties have scheduled public hearings on the challenges in the days after Election Day, and officials will continue accepting ballots from out-of-state voters for a week after Tuesday.

A close race in Pennsylvania, where thousands of ballots could determine which presidential candidate wins, could put even more spotlight on this looming controversy.

In Center County, dealing with a hundred challenges is not easy for local election officials as they focus on setting up polling places for Tuesday’s election.

“We’re already crushingly busy, and that’s not counting the people who are trying to break democracy,” said Mark Higgins, Democratic chairman of the county board of commissioners. “This is not normal.”

Edited by Benjamin Swasey