A social media post cited by Elon Musk to bolster his argument that mail-in voting should be curtailed, and which was subsequently amplified by President Donald Trump, makes the false and long-ago debunked claim that in the 2020 election, “Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots.”
As the Pennsylvania Department of State’s final report on the 2020 election shows, there were 2,673,272 mail-in ballot applications approved for the 2020 general election, so that’s how many were sent out. And of those, 2,273,490 votes were cast. (See charts 6.2 and 6.3 in the report.) Another 435,932 absentee ballots were also approved, and 374,659 of them were cast.
As online Pennsylvania records show, there were roughly 1.8 million absentee and mail-in ballots approved for the primary election in 2020, nearly 1.5 million of which were cast. In other words, the post mixes up the number of mail-in ballots (including absentee ballots) sent for the 2020 primary election and then cites the approximate number of mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 general election.
“These are long-ago debunked claims that will not disappear despite the availability of official data,” Stewart said.
The Posts
Trump has been making false and unfounded claims related to mail-in voting for years. And he has long called for ending mail-in voting “other than if you’re in the military, or you’re sick, or you’re away, or some reasonable but good excuse,” as he said on Feb. 9.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk, a former Trump adviser, agrees, according to a Feb. 8 post from an X account called The Leading Report: “Elon Musk calls for mail-in voting to be abolished nationwide except for troops overseas or a serious medical condition.” Musk reposted it and commented, “Critical to avoid fraud.”
The same day, The SCIF — an X account whose bio identifies the operator as a “Digital Operator, Creator and Intelligence Researcher” with the motto, “Truth is the most effective weapon in a war of information filled with lies” — weighed in with an X post that read: “Elon is right, banning mail-in voting is critical to avoiding fraud in our elections. During the 2020 election, Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots. This accounts for Biden’s fraudulent and impossible 682,000+ vote spike, which were counted with NO observers and were all for Biden, which magically just happened to be enough to steal Trump’s almost 700,000 vote lead in PA before swing states shut down counting locations at the same time, to steal the 2020 election. PA’s own Secretary of State website then wiped the 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballot number after the total number was questioned. Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide.”
Musk reposted that and commented, “Essential to stop fraud in elections.” On Feb. 10, Trump reposted the claim and Musk’s response on Truth Social, without comment.
This latest criticism of mail-in voting comes as Congress considers the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and also photo identification to vote in federal elections. It would not abolish mail-in voting, but it would require a copy of identification to both request and submit a mail-in ballot.
Mail-in voting is widely used around the country. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 28 states — including Pennsylvania — offer “no excuse” mail-in voting, meaning any voter can request a mail-in ballot without providing a reason. (Pennsylvania has both no-excuse mail-in ballots as well as absentee ballots for those who can’t make it to a polling place due to illness, disability, work or travel.)
The post claiming there were hundreds of thousands more mail-in ballots received than were actually sent out in Pennsylvania — a swing state that broke for Biden in 2020 — originated in a Nov. 25, 2020, hearing held by Pennsylvania Senate Republicans (a video of which is attached to the post). During that hearing, then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani referred to Pennsylvania voting data and said, “Now this is the part that is a mystery. Mailed ballots sent out: 1,823,148. But when you go to the count of the final count of the vote, there are 2,589,242 mail-in ballots.” Giuliani asked witness Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, “How do you account for the 700,000 mail-in ballots that appeared from nowhere?”
Waldron, who has promoted many unfounded theories about manipulated voting machines, speculated that the machines may have been tampered with and called for a “detailed forensic analysis” of those used in Pennsylvania.
(Waldron later circulated a PowerPoint document to Trump allies that drew the attention of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. At the time, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the panel, called the document “an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election.” According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Waldron was among those who “invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the Select Committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen.”)
But again, the premise of Giuliani’s question was flawed. There were not more ballots returned in Pennsylvania than had been sent out.
“This is completely false,” Kathy Boockvar, who was the Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth at the time of the 2020 election, said in an email to us about the online claim. She explained the same thing in a Dec. 16, 2020, letter to U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson and Gary Peters about similar claims.
All of the election data are, and were, in public records available online, and they contradict Giuliani’s claim.
The claim is also contradicted by the contemporaneous reporting made to the U.S. Elections Project, a clearinghouse for voting data maintained by Mike McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida.
“The individual-level Pennsylvania 2020 mail ballot data I received on a daily basis from the Secretary of State’s office does not substantiate these allegations,” McDonald told us via email. “Pennsylvania election officials reported issuing a little over 3 million mail ballots during the COVID crisis, of which election officials accepted a little more than 2.6 million returned ballots.” Those figures include both mail-in and absentee ballots.
And the claim is further contradicted by news accounts before the election that cited the correct number of ballot requests for the general election.
“It’s pretty unbelievable this is still being used,” Eric Kraeutler, a member of the board of directors and former chair of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based election watchdog, told us in a phone interview. “They mixed up data for these two separate elections (the 2020 primary and general elections). … As far as we’re concerned, this was disposed of five or six years ago.”
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-- By Jessica Perry
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