Meet the Ballot Harvesting Capital of America
The Philadelphia suburbs, especially Delaware County. And it's legal.
Before moving to Northern Virginia following the 2020 elections, my family and I were 18-year residents of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, home to roughly 575,000 residents. It borders Philadelphia city and county to the west. It remarkably transforms from Upper Darby in the east to the leafy, bucolic neighborhoods and mini-mansions of Edgmont and Chadds Ford townships.
It includes the traditionally working-class union households in tidy neighborhoods like Marcus Hook and Chichester and the predominantly African-American suburb of Chester, also home to its local Major League Soccer franchise and stadium. It features the tony shops and stately neighborhoods of the Radnor, Wayne, and Berwyn, cities along the famed “Main Line.” Two of the nation’s most highly rated, expensive, left-wing colleges - Haverford and Swarthmore - are found at opposite ends of the county. African-American and college-educated populations exceed the national average at 23 percent and 39 percent, respectively.
And this once largely Republican-leaning county, with the GOP holding almost all elected county and state elected officials less than a decade ago, has become a deep blue Democratic stronghold. It is also the national capital for ballot harvesting.
Athan Koutsiouroumbis, a former congressional chief of staff and astute political observer and practitioner in the Keystone State, outlines precisely how local Democrats expertly - and legally - made this happen. And Republicans must follow suit or surrender. It’s a must-read.
America’s Ballot-Harvesting Capital Is in Suburban Philly
By Athan Koutsiouroumbas
December 05, 2022
This fall, as the midterm elections approached, a leafy suburb west of Philadelphia became Pennsylvania’s ballot-harvesting leader – and perhaps the nation’s. That suburb, Delaware County, defied both convention and statistical trends, as local Democratic organizers built a completely legal ballot-harvesting juggernaut.
You might presume that Pennsylvania ballot-harvesting happens in Philadelphia’s mean streets or in woke college dorms. No: these organizers did their work in plain sight, along Delaware County’s bucolic oak-lined sidewalks and soccer fields. And they enrolled Democratic voters for mail-in balloting when no other Pennsylvania county was able to do so.
Prior to the pandemic, Pennsylvania had passed an election-reform law enabling mail-in voting.
Unlike in-person voting, which requires no voter identification, Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot process requires the applicant to provide identification, either a driver’s license or Social Security number. County Boards of Elections are required to verify the information, or the ballot cannot be cast.
Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting has more fail-safes than traditional in-person voting. For fraud to occur with mail-in balloting, at a scale that can affect a statewide election, it must happen at two points: harvesters illegally obtaining lists of driver’s licenses or Social Security numbers to complete applications and cast ballots without voters’ knowledge; or Board of Elections workers conspiring to invalidate applications.
As there is no evidence of either of these happening in Delaware County, how, exactly, were ballots harvested?
Pennsylvania has sixty-seven counties. Each operates a Board of Elections. As mail-in ballot applications are submitted by voters to county Boards of Elections, employees time-stamp when applications are received, when ballots are mailed, and when ballots are returned.
These time-stamps paint a fascinating picture. In sixty-six of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties, application rates followed a nearly identical pattern. In a typical county, two-thirds of Democratic mail-in ballot applications occur in the spring, and one-third happen in the fall. The fewest applications happen during the summer.
The reason most Democratic voters apply for a mail-in ballot in the spring is because by statute, county Boards of Elections are required to mail the prior year’s applicants new applications to re-enroll. Smartly, Democratic campaigns leverage those taxpayer-funded, official mailings to do the heavy lifting while their campaigns “chase” those mailers with texts, robocalls, and digital ads encouraging Democratic voters to re-enroll.
With liberal voters adhering to Anthony Fauci’s contact guidance during the pandemic, Pennsylvania Democrats adopted mail-in voting at an astonishing rate, while Republicans chose to continue voting in-person. In 2020, for example, over half of Democratic ballots cast in Philadelphia were by mail, despite most Philadelphians being no farther than a five-minute walk from their polling station.
The remaining one-third of Democratic voters apply for a mail-in ballot during the fall. Democratic ballot-harvesting efforts tend to pump the breaks by late September because nearly 15% of Democratic mail-in ballot applicants do not return ballots. Those late mail-in ballot applicants often wind up as uncast votes. In the final three weeks of an election, Democratic organizers believe that it is best to focus on shepherding voters to vote in-person instead.
Delaware County was the only one in the state to buck the two-third/one-third trend. It got most of its Democratic mail-in ballot applications during the summer.
One might have assumed that the Dobbs abortion decision, released in late June 2022, would have led to a summer surge in Democratic mail-in ballot applications. Yet across Pennsylvania, the presumed Dobbs summer surge never came.
The summer was weak for Democratic ballot harvesters, even in the Democratic strongholds of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Make no mistake, U.S. Senator-elect John Fetterman and Governor-elect Josh Shapiro had the resources to do it. Likewise, the summer surge never came in Montgomery County, home to the Democratic suburban base.
Many neighborhoods in Delaware County can be sparsely inhabited during the summer, with vacation destinations of the Jersey Shore or Poconos just a short car drive away. That did not matter to Delaware County’s Democratic organizers, who continued working here.
Delaware County’s Democratic candidates relentlessly knocked on doors throughout the summer, carrying mail-in ballot applications for voters. The candidates’ volunteers and paid canvassers did the same, knowing that 85% of those who apply will cast a ballot. Those votes were in the bank before Labor Day.
Sixty-one percent of summer Democratic mail-in ballot applicants were women. The application surge was spread across the county, with competitive races seeing a larger proportional share. Fewer than 10% of those summer Democratic applicants failed to return ballots, significantly better than the statewide average.
Delaware County Democrats defied political gravity through hard work. Republicans need to do the same or be destined to failure in future elections.