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.
