A mass voter fraud scheme allegedly involving fraudulent registration forms across multiple Pennsylvania counties was thwarted in the lead-up to Election Day. Local officials are pointing to a Democrat-aligned firm from Arizona run by a Kamala Harris supporter as the culprit orchestrating it.
Monroe County
Following a routine review of voter registration applications and mail-in ballot requests, the Monroe County Board of Elections identified approximately 30 "irregular" forms, the county's district attorney, Mike Mancuso, a Democrat, announced on Facebook last week.
The matter was then referred to Mancuso's office for further investigation.
Several of these suspicious forms were found to be fraudulent "as they were not authorized by the persons named as applicants," Mancuso wrote in Tuesday's post. On at least one form, the named applicant was, in fact, deceased.
Of the fraudulent voter registration forms, some were traced back to a specific person.
A company called "Field + Media Corps," a subsidiary of the "minority-owned" Fieldcorps and an Arizona-based organization operating out of Lancaster County, was responsible for submitting the forms in question to county officials, Mancuso revealed.
Field + Media Corps, whose "voter outreach" work has been flagged before by Arizona authorities, is a consulting firm that has worked with a long list of Democratic, left-wing, and anti-Trump outfits. Per Open Secrets, Fieldcorps' funding comes from progressive groups like Living United for Change in Arizona, which seeks to "advance social, racial, and economic justice."
FieldCorps LLC’s listed website is offline, but per Open Secrets they got money from progressive groups Living United for Change in Arizona in 2022 and Working Families Party in 2024. https://t.co/HhnKpnmclf pic.twitter.com/87QrJIjH4M
— David Hines (@hradzka) November 1, 2024
Since the DA's announcement, Mancuso provided an update Friday night disclosing that additional fraudulent applications were found.
As of Friday, 27 documents have been referred to the DA's office by the elections board. Of those referrals, 21 were mailed to Monroe County by Fieldcorps. Out of the Fieldcorps applications, 16 were flagged as fraudulent for forged signatures, often with incorrect or incomplete identifying information.
About half of the counterfeits are connected to individual employees of Fieldcorps whose names were listed on the fraudulent forms as "assisting" in their completion.
Concerning the six non-Fieldcorps applications, two are actually mail-in ballots that were allegedly stolen in unsuccessful attempts to cast them, Mancuso stated. The other three remain under investigation.
Mancuso said the investigation is ongoing and that a broader probe into Fieldcorps' alleged involvement is underway.
Francisco Heredia, CEO and partner of Field + Media Corps as well as the Democratic vice mayor of Mesa, Arizona, where its parent company is headquartered, released a statement reacting to the revelations. "We are proud of our work to help expand access to voting through our nonpartisan voter registration program," Heredia said. "We have not been contacted by election officials in PA counties and we have no additional information on the alleged problematic registration forms."
"We would hope that if Field+Media Corps were the subject of any active investigation, that we would be proactively contacted by the appropriate officials," he continued. "If we are contacted, we will work with local officials to help resolve any discrepancies to allow eligible people to vote."
Heredia added that Field + Media Corps is trying to connect with Monroe County election officials, but reiterated that he received no information regarding the incident and had heard about the company being mentioned in media reports.
The website for Field + Media Corps is now no longer active.
Founded in 2017, Field + Media Corps specializes in strategic media and field work for clients, including voter registration campaigns, door-to-door canvassing, advancing ballot measures, phone banking, and texting voters. Along with Arizona, the firm additionally hires political canvassers in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and California, its jobs page said.
The people allegedly behind these illegal PA registrations— Fieldcorps — have been paid more than $2.9M by Arizona Democrats alone so far this year, and hundreds of thousands by Mi Familia Vota, Democrats’ favorite vehicle for court challenges to tear down AZ voter protections! https://t.co/zDXT1K5zwV pic.twitter.com/IdEoNsqXo2
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) November 1, 2024
Heredia, a pro-Harris voting activist who owns a commercial print shop, confirmed to VoteBeat that his company worked in Pennsylvania for more than five months leading up to the registration deadline and submitted voter forms about every other week.
He previously served as national field director for Mi Familia Vota, which aims to increase left-leaning Latino votes and grant citizenship status to illegal immigrants.
More details via VoteBeat:
Heredia has been a councilman in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb of about a half million people, since 2017. He was reelected in July. Before joining the council, he was for years a leader of Mi Familia Vota, a prominent Latino voter advocacy group, according to his LinkedIn profile. For a short period in 2017, he was the community relations manager for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office.
Field+Media Corps operates voter registration drives for clients in Arizona, too. Last year, both Navajo and Mohave counties flagged voter registration forms from the company and sent them to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office for investigation, office spokesperson Richie Taylor confirmed to Votebeat Thursday.
Taylor said that Maricopa County prosecutors took the lead on investigating, because the forms were initially submitted there before being sent on to Navajo and Mohave. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office confirmed the office opened a related investigation, but was unable to immediately provide more detail.
Asked about the Pennsylvania and Arizona investigations, Heredia said the company trains workers to fill out forms accurately. When asked about the characterization of some submitted forms as fraudulent, Heredia said Field+Media Corps has a zero tolerance policy for workers who submit fraudulent forms.
He said the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office contacted his company last year in connection with an investigation into two canvassers the company employed. Field+Media Corps fired those two workers, Heredia said.
Clients or past clients of Field+Media Corps in Arizona include several prominent Arizona voter advocacy groups, including LUCHA, Chispa AZ, and CPLC Action Fund, according to the company’s website.
This election cycle, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has flagged FieldCorps, the parent company of Field+Media Corps, for submitting a high percentage of incomplete or inaccurate forms, office spokesperson Sierra Ciaramella confirmed Wednesday.
Heredia said that he is in regular contact with the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, and has been for years, since he began doing this work in Arizona. He said that he is open to ways that the company can turn in more accurate forms and that his company has a good working relationship with the county.
Monroe County's director of elections and voter registration, Sara May-Silfee, recounted to the Pocono Record how she first discovered discrepancies across a few forms received earlier in October. "When they came in, we opened them, and we realized that were from June, July, August, September," said May-Silfee. "I realized they were dated months before, and really, you shouldn't be holding registration that long."
So, her staff ran the suspect forms through the state's system. They then realized that a lot of the applicants had listed broken and fractured hands and arms as reasons why another person filled out the application on their behalf. Some also had the same witness.
After systematically cross-checking them, "obviously they all bounced back for bad Social Security numbers. The phone numbers — we're trying to call the people — they weren't correct,” said May-Silfee. "One was an address in the middle of the field in Kunkletown. Another was somebody who was marked in the system deceased."
Investigators from the attorney general's office are in regular contact and working closely with Mancuso's department.
Monroe County used to be a Republican stronghold. However, Barack Obama, the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide in 1964, flipped Monroe County blue. In recent years, party registration has leaned left, thanks largely to the migration of former New York City residents flocking from the northeast. Now, no-party voters (125,977) reportedly outnumber registered Republicans in the county (125,010). Meanwhile, most of the county's party-affiliated registrants are Democrats (205,314).
York County
York County's elections office also recently received "a large delivery containing thousands of election-related material" from the third-party organization, according to the York-licensed FOX 43. Field + Media Corps allegedly made the delivery on behalf of the Everybody Votes Campaign, a Soros-tied voter mobilization group that aims to expand voting access for "communities of color."
"It's not unusual to get large stacks of voter registrations or large stacks of requests for mail-in ballots. It's just this was an overabundance of registrations from one particular organization," York County President Commissioner Julie Wheeler said.
Wheeler stressed: "We're in a phase now where we need to do our homework before we go and make accusations when we don’t have the data to back it up."
Right now, election officials are ensuring the authenticity of all of the submitted forms, she said. If fraud is suspected, the district attorney will be alerted accordingly to conduct an investigation. "We will have no further comment until our internal review has been completed," Wheeler stated.
To date, nearly half (47 percent) of the 3,087 flagged forms were ultimately approved while roughly 740 forms were referred to the York County district attorney's office for "further analysis," WITF reports. The county is seeking additional information from applicants on about 890 forms.
The York County chief prosecutor's office said it's in constant contact with the election officials regarding any potential irregularities.
This situation comes after York, a Republican-majority county, allegedly sent at least 421 mail-in ballots to the incorrect postal addresses. Election hawks, however, suspect that this number of misplaced mail-in ballots is more likely in the thousands.
Republican registration in York County currently beats Democrats by about 71,400 signatures. This lead indicates that Donald Trump will outpoll Kamala Harris locally, like in 2020, when Trump won York County by better than a three-to-one vote, The York Daily Record reports. Over the past 40 years, the county's conservatives have continuously out-registered progressives.
Lancaster County
In neighboring Lancaster County, election officials announced they're investigating approximately 2,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration applications linked to a "large-scale canvassing operation" that's been largely focused on Lancaster since June, but did not initially identify the organization behind it.
The batch of last-minute submissions, arriving shortly before Pennsylvania's registration deadline, allegedly contained false names, questionable signatures, mismatched Society Security numbers, incorrect addresses, and other discrepancies, such as suspicious handwriting, though some of the forms were deemed legitimate later on.
"It appears to be an organized effort at this point, but of course, it's an ongoing investigation and we'll be looking into who participated and how far up it goes," Lancaster County DA Heather Adams, a Republican, remarked at an October 25 press conference.
Lancaster, PA DA Heather Adams on concerns over potentially fraudulent voter registration forms.
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 1, 2024
pic.twitter.com/t9gkj9CV0V
Adams did not say who dropped off the forms or whom they may have been working with. Of the applications that have been investigated so far, about 60 percent were found to be possibly fraudulent, Adams said. The other applications were verified as accurate and are being processed as normal.
"The fact of the matter is we've contained this," said Lancaster Commissioner Ray D'Agostino, a Republican who chairs the county's election board. "This is not right. It's illegal. It's immoral. And we found it, and we're going to take care of it."
According to Lancaster Online, election officials eventually connected the registration applications under review to two paid canvassing organizations that recently conducted registration drives in the county, noting that they were active in two other Pennsylvania counties as well. However, they didn't name those responsible or the other counties targeted. Details are still limited.
The canvassing was part of a paid effort wherein the canvassers were employed and paid to obtain voter registrations, Adams said. A job posting for a Fieldcorps "political canvasser" says the $20-per-hour temporary gig requires little to no experience.
The reliably Republican county has only ever voted for a Democrat seeking the presidency once (Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964) since James Buchanan in 1856, a resident of the city of Lancaster.
The Pennsylvania State Department issued a statement saying it's aware of the allegations of voter registration fraud in Lancaster County and is offering support. Pennsylvania's Republican Secretary of State Al Schmidt also addressed the investigation via a virtual media update: "We still don't have a lot of details about these implications so it's important to not rush to judgment. We hope for a speedy and accurate conclusion to the investigation."
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, said in a press release: "While we will not be divulging sensitive information about these investigations, we want to clarify that the investigations regard voter registration forms, not ballots. These attempts have been thwarted by the safeguards in place in Pennsylvania. We are working every day with our partners to ensure a fair, free, and safe election." She promised that "offenders who perpetrated acts of fraud will be held accountable under the law."
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