Elon Musk falsely claims that Pa. Democrats are “committing a crime.”

Elon Musk sent to Xplatform he owns that Pennsylvania Democrats are “now openly committing a crime” by working to change the outcome of the U.S. Senate race by counting the votes of non-U.S. citizens.

This is not true.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in Pennsylvania, let alone that Democrats are working to count their votes in the state.

Musk’s post is actually a response to posts about the ongoing changes that have taken place in counties in the provisional ballot process and the commonwealth race.

Democrats have filed complaints against the rejection of some ballots. The process is completely legal, but has gained more scrutiny in the wake of the Democratic race Senator Bob Casey and Republican Dave McCormick goes to replay.

The Associated Press declared McCormick the winner last week, but the race was rerun under state law because his margin of victory is less than half a percentage point.

Counties are still completing the initial count while considering which provisional ballots to accept.

Here’s what’s happening

Provisional ballots are a fail-safe measure provided to voters at the polls if it is not immediately clear whether they are eligible to vote or have not yet cast an absentee ballot.

These ballots are among the last to be counted in the election because they require the most work. They must be individually checked by election board staff to determine whether the ballot is valid and the voter is eligible. Political parties and candidates then have the opportunity to challenge electoral commissions’ decisions on whether ballots will be included.

In several counties, Democrats filed challenges to boards over decisions to reject ballots cast by voters that could not be found in the state’s voter registration system.

According to Philadelphia city commissioners, several of these city challenges arose when a lawyer for state Rep. Jordan Harris (R-Philadelphia) argued that the Board of Elections had improperly removed voters from the voter rolls due to inactivity.

Philadelphia Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, said he doesn’t see any challenges in Philadelphia aimed at counting votes from non-citizens.

Casey’s campaign has posed similar challenges in other counties. The goal of the campaign was to ensure that voters were not falsely rejected when they were actually registered voters.

At a Thursday hearing in Bucks County, attorneys for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party challenged the county’s decision to reject more than 220 ballots from voters deemed unregistered.

Attorney Dawn Burke told the county board of elections that the party’s research showed that at least 217 of those voters were actually registered, although she could not say at the hearing whether the party believed they were registered in Bucks County or anywhere else. She also identified an additional five voters who had pending voter registration applications when they cast their provisional ballots.

But although Burke insisted that the board count all of those votes, county commissioners ultimately voted to reject them while they further investigated the party’s claims.

In a letter to Lackawanna County containing the objection, Casey’s campaign attorney noted that York County had mistakenly rejected ballots from registered voters, an error he discovered after review. They argued that the York question deserved consideration in other counties.

Additionally, the letter argued that ballots should be counted for voters whose registration applications were rejected because the voter did not enter identification numbers on the application or provided missing or incomplete information on the application. The campaign also asked county clerks to confirm that they properly complied with federal voter registration cancellation laws and did not improperly remove valid voters from the rolls.

“No one is trying to count votes from people who were not registered. This is categorically false. “This is a blatant attempt to lie and distract Pennsylvanians from its efforts to disenfranchise Pennsylvanians by rejecting the votes of registered voters,” said Adam Bonin, an attorney working on behalf of the campaign.

But this move is unusual.

Bluestein said he doesn’t recall receiving calls in the past to reject unregistered voters.

What does the McCormick campaign say?

McCormick’s campaign argued that the challenges were unprecedented and represented a massive effort to count the ballots of ineligible voters. A campaign spokesperson retweeted Musk’s post, which falsely claimed that the Casey campaign had illegally taken action to count votes from non-citizens.

In a call with reporters Thursday, the campaign pledged to pursue legal action. Officials argued that Casey’s campaign sought to bypass the statewide Uniform Registry of Voters (SURE), which tracks voter registration and voter activity in the state.

“We think this is a completely extreme argument, outside the mainstream. “Everyone knows that the election boards and the SURE system determine who is registered and who is not,” said James Fitzpatrick, a lawyer for the campaign.

Pennsylvania law is very clear that unregistered voters cannot cast a ballot. It is very unlikely that the electoral commissions will accept these votes. Both Republicans and Democrats will be able to appeal the commission’s decision to the district court.

Any court decision to allow votes cast by unregistered voters to be counted would mean mass upheaval Pennsylvania suffrage.