Chester County election, in hands of Democrats, will play out next week

WEST CHESTER » The Chester County Board of Elections is scheduled to meet next week to formally take up the question of whether results of the 2021 Municipal Election in favor of Democrats should be officially certified, or whether the county should undergo some unprecedented review of those figures, as Republicans continue their assaults on the election’s outcome.

The meeting may be a long one, and contentious, with both officials and voters weighing in on the future of the election.

Commissioner Michelle Kichline, the board’s lone Republican member, has called for a complete recount of the election results, which showed a multitude of races being won by Democratic candidates at all levels in dramatic fashion — coming from behind among in-person balloting to surge ahead of their GOP opponents when mail-in and absentee ballots were added to the total, days after the polls closed.

“Elections are a fundamental cornerstone of our republic, and voters deserve to be confident in the outcomes of those elections. In fact, the integrity of the processes used in an election is more important than the outcomes of an election,” said Kichline in a letter to her colleagues, and also to Dr. Gordon Eck, the chairman of the Chester County Republican Committee.

“I have heard the concerns of scores of voters in the past few days,” Kichline said in her Nov. 10 letter. “Their concerns are my concerns. I am committed to ensuring that every vote cast in Chester County is accounted for. Anything less would be unacceptable.”

Eck, a conservative Republican, has said the county needs a “full forensic audit” of the results.

“The purpose of the audit is not to overturn the election,” Eck maintains. “Rather, the goal is to ensure our voting machines worked properly, that applicable state and federal laws and regulations were followed, that the voter registration lists were accurate and current and only allowed eligible individuals to vote, that all eligible voters were able to vote, that their vote was correctly counted, and that their votes were not inappropriately voided.”

There does not appear to be any immediate support among Kichline’s Democratic colleagues, however, for either the drastic measure as a full recount or a forensic audit.

Commissioners Chairwoman Marian Moskowitz, who chairs the elections board, said in an interview Tuesday that she and her fellow board members, Kichline and Vice Chairman Josh Maxwell, had not discussed the notion of a recount, nor made any decision about whether such a step is necessary.

“We are not there yet,” she said, noting that the Office of Voter Services had only recently finished counting all the provisional and military overseas ballots, and would file their full computation numbers at 5 p.m. Tuesday.

(Normal requests for recounts in individual elections by the losing candidates must be made by Saturday, five days after the full count by the Office of Voters Services. It is unclear what the timeline for a full countywide recount would be, since none has ever been conducted in the county.)

Moskowitz agreed that some review of the election process would be beneficial, noting for example that it became apparent recently that the county had been counting ballots at the wrong location for years — tallying is by law to be done in West Chester borough, the county seat, and not West Goshen, where the Office of Voter Services is located, she said.

The commissioner said a possible recount would be a topic of discussion Monday, but seemed to throw cold water on Eck’s call for an unprecedented “full forensic audit” of the county’s ballots. “We’re not doing a forensic audit, whatever that is,” she said.

From reported accounts, there are several after-Election Day tabulation problems that delayed full reports of the results until more than a week after the Nov. 2 voting. They include spoilage of mail-in ballots caused by envelope-opening machines; malfunctioning USB sticks; jammed scanners; delays to let Republican observers decide on challenging results; and one duffel bag of missed ballots found days after the polls closed.

The elections board is set to meet on Monday at 8:30 a.m. in Courtroom One of the Historic Chester County Courthouse on North High Street. The normally mundane task of certifying the official results of the election will likely see not only Kichline’s call for a recount debated, but also further calls from skeptical Republicans for that “full forensic recount” of the votes and procedures used to process and count them demanded by the GOP.

An forensic audit was on the minds of a number of county residents who attended or spoke virtually at the last commissioners meeting on Nov. 10. More than a dozen people expressed support for, or otherwise demanded, that a “full forensic audit” of the county’s election system and recent results be conducted before the results were finalized, saying it was necessary to restore faith in the integrity of the results.

“This is turning into China,” said one Tredyffrin woman, who identified herself as Duijin Qui. “In my opinion, the whole mail-in ballot is designed for cheating.”

“The only confidence I have is putting the ballots in voters’ hands,” said speaker Becky Bowman, another person asking for an audit. “Now is the time to get out in front of this.”

Although most who spoke did not provide specifics of what such a forensic audit would entail, a Schuylkill woman who identified herself as Becky Herman said it would entail something akin to “IRS field agents” examining every aspect of the election, which saw more than 144,000 people cast ballots for races at the state, county, school district and municipal levels.

“We want them to check everything in every process,” she said. “A simple recount does. It does not insure that every ballot was legal, and it does not insure that the voting machines were secure, nor does it insure compliance with the chain of custody,” she said. “I think there were serious problems in the United States beginning in 2020 and now.”

“There are problems with the process at every level,” agreed GOP supporter Gary Heasley, who had demanded an audit of the 2020 election results in the county prior to the Nov. 2 election. “If we lose our faith in the process, we lose our faith in everything in this government.”

Another man, identifying himself as Eric Raymond, “a student of history,” warned that the county’s failure to conduct an audit would have dire consequences.

“When nations die, when systems die … the violence that follows happens,” he said, contending that “half” of the country does not accept the results of the election. “They think their votes have been stolen from them. They believe that the ballot box and the jury box have failed them, absolutely and utterly. But there is a third box that gets pulled out in this situation, and that is the cartridge box.”

Meanwhile, the county disputed the notion that the election had been anything but fair and honest.

“As they do throughout every election process, staff in our Department of Voter Services have upheld our policy of transparency, working with both parties throughout the November 2021 election,” county spokeswoman Rebecca Brain said Tuesday. “The unforeseen issues that occurred during the processing of mail-in ballots were addressed and resolved, also in the presence of both (political) parties.

“The integrity of the bal