Democratic West Chester Mayor Carolyn Comitta
Republican PA State Rep. Dan Truitt, R-156
"WEST GOSHEN -
Staff at the Chester County Office of Voter Services continue a formal hand recount of the ballots cast in the tight race for the 156th Legislative District seat between apparent winner West Chester Mayor Carolyn Comitta and current state Rep. Dan Truitt of East Goshen.
According to a statement from the county, the recount began Tuesday afternoon, and will continue until completion, now estimated to be by the end of the week. The recount will be witnessed by the candidates in each race or their representative attorneys, as well as appointed representatives from each candidate. The press and the public, however, are not permitted in the area of the county’s Government Services Center where it is taking place."
Approximately 36,500 ballots will be recounted.
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Recount underway in 156th
By Michael Rellahan, Daily Local News
POSTED: 12/14/16, 1:49 PM EST
"When Donald Trump claimed, 'the election's going to be rigged,' he wasn't entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of 'voting many, many times.' What's far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
Like all weapons of vote suppression, Crosscheck is a response to the imaginary menace of mass voter fraud. In the mid-2000s, after the Florida-recount debacle, the Bush administration launched a five-year investigation into the allegedly rampant crime but found scant evidence of wrongdoing. Still, the GOP has perpetuated the myth in every national election since. Recently, North Carolina Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to her legislature that 35,750 voters are "registered in North Carolina and another state and voted in both in the 2012 general election." [Editor’s note: This quote was taken from the power point that accompanied Strach’s testimony. In a subsequent letter, she informed us that during her presentation she "stressed that we were not suggesting that 35,750 voters had committed any type of fraud. My testimony was that the data we received from the Crosscheck Program showed that in the 2012 general election, there were 35,750 people who voted in North Carolina whose first and last names and dates of birth matched persons who voted in the same election in another state.”] Yet despite hiring an ex-FBI agent to lead the hunt, the state has charged exactly zero double voters from the Crosscheck list. Nevertheless, tens of thousands face the loss of their ability to vote – all for the sake of preventing a crime that rarely happens. So far, Crosscheck has tagged an astonishing 7.2 million suspects, yet we found no more than four perpetrators who have been charged with double voting or deliberate double registration.
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Rolling Stone
Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump's advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?
August 24, 2016
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JIM CROW RETURNS MILLIONS OF MINORITIES THREATENED BY ELECTORAL PURGEFormer Republican Chester County Commissioner now Secretary of State Carol Aichele administers Pennsylvania's CROSS CHECK PROGRAM. It’s Jim Crow all over again," says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery, now 93, says he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. “I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.”
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