Musk falsely claims Bob Casey is asking to count non-citizen votes

Caleb McCullough
| PolitiFact.com

Statement: Says Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., “trying to change the outcome of the election by counting non-citizen votes.”

As Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race headed toward a recount, candidates’ campaigns battled over small swathes of provisional ballots in counties across the state.

On November 19, about 16,400 votes separated Republican Dave McCormick from incumbent Senator Bob Casey, according to CNN. Associated Press called the race for McCormick on November 7, but Casey has not conceded. The contest is within the 0.5% margin that triggers one automatic recalculation according to state law.

The counties must begin the recalculation by November 20 at the latest. Some counties have already started table of the 7 million paper ballots that will be recounted.

Elon Musk, who exploited his enormous wealth this year to campaign for President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, accused Casey of trying to count the votes of non-citizens, who are legally barred from voting.

“Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate candidate is trying to change election results by counting non-citizen votes, which is illegal,” Musk wrote November 13 on its social media platform Xformerly Twitter.

This claim lacks evidence.

The Casey and McCormick campaigns have sparred over the validity of an esteemed 60,000 provisional ballots across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. Provisional polls are issued when voters’ eligibility to vote is in question — records may show that these people have already voted, or are not registered in the correct county, or are not registered to vote at all.

After the election, county officials check to see if provisional ballots are valid. Ballots deemed valid are included in the final vote count; invalid ballots are thrown out. Campaigns can challenge decisions to accept or reject these ballots.

This process takes place in every election i almost every state.

The Casey and McCormick campaigns have been at odds over whether to count provisional ballots. But so far, the citizenship of voters who cast provisional ballots is not questioned.

PolitiFact reviewed the public poll hearings in Pennsylvania and was investigated local reporting on provisional ballot questions. We found no cases of ballots being rejected because someone was not a citizen, or because Casey’s campaign had asked officials to count the votes of known noncitizens. Local outlets that reported on Musk’s claim called it false.

X’s press team did not respond to our inquiry about Musk’s claim.

McCormick’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. McCormick’s campaign manager, Matt Grudahave accused Casey’s campaign of trying to count unregistered voters, but neither Gruda nor the campaign has said publicly that noncitizens voted.

Challenge the validity of the ballots

Casey’s campaign has largely urged election officials to count as many provisional ballots as possible. That includes ballots missing poll workers’ signatures, voter information or confidentiality envelopes.

Casey’s campaign also challenged the rejection of lots of ballots in counties where voters’ names could not be found on county voter registration rolls. The campaign asked officials to recheck the registration lists and said the ballots of voters with pending registrations should be accepted.

In many cases, the Casey campaign later audited those ballots and provided officials with ballots believed to have been mislabeled as coming from people who were not registered to vote.

An attorney from Casey’s campaign said in a letter to the Lackawanna County attorney that ballots should be accepted if the voters who cast them were registered in another county but moved to and voted in a new county within the past 30 days. The attorney also said voters with pending registration status should be allowed to vote if their registration applications were valid, adding that counties should follow federal law when removing voters from voting rolls.

Gruda, McCormick’s campaign manager, has called these efforts an attempt to count the votes of people who are not registered to vote. He said in a 13 Nov X posts that Casey is “trying to illegally count UNREGISTERED voters as a way to cut into (McCormick’s) margin.”

Gruda’s post is in the chain of X posts that Musk commented on, although Gruda did not mention non-citizens.

Casey’s campaign has denied that it is demanding that unregistered voters’ ballots be counted and that it is asking officials not to reject votes from voters who are registered.

“No one is trying to count votes from individuals who were not registered,” Casey’s campaign attorney Adam Bonin said. “This is categorically false.”

McCormick’s campaign has asked that ballots be rejected if voters’ names are not on the voter rolls. County officials have generally voted to throw out these ballots; some have said they will verify the status of voters Democrats identified as registered.

In videos of provisional ballot negotiations reviewed by PolitiFact, i Philadelphia and Allegheny, Lancaster and Montgomery county the question of non-citizens voting did not come up. And the letter from Casey’s campaign stating the reasons why the ballots should be counted made no reference to non-citizens.

James Allen, Delaware County’s director of elections, said there was no non-citizen dispute when the county reviewed preliminary ballots.

“We had hundreds and hundreds of challenges, but we haven’t had one person say, ‘Ah, look at this, a group of non-citizens,'” Allen said.

Allen said Musk and other people who have made such claims have not provided evidence that non-citizens voted in Pennsylvania.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Seth Bluestein, a Republican commissioner in Philadelphia, said he did not see challenges in the city based on non-citizens. Pittsburgh radio station WESA-FM reported that Lackawanna County Solicitor Donald Frederickson Jr. said non-citizens were not a problem in his county either.

PolitiFact’s verdict

Musk said Casey is “trying to change the election results by counting non-citizen votes, which is illegal.”

US Senate candidates in Pennsylvania are dueling over whether provisional ballots in counties across the state are valid. In many cases, Casey’s campaign has challenged the rejection of ballots from voters who were not on the county’s electoral roll.

But Casey’s campaign has not asked for non-citizen votes to be counted. In the county meetings PolitiFact reviewed, non-citizen votes were not at issue. McCormick’s campaign also has not argued that Casey is trying to count non-citizen votes.

We rate the claim as false.