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For 14 persons on Lycoming County's voter rolls, the failure to provide a valid residential address on their voter registration means that their ability to vote has been canceled until they choose to re-register with the required information. Half of the challenged registrations listed a post office as their address and the other half listed the UPS store on East Third Street.
The challenge to the addresses was handled at a hearing during the meeting of the county's Board of Elections this week.
During the proceedings, Forrest Lehman, the county's director of voter services, was asked by Commissioner Tony Mussare, a member of the Board of Elections, if these could be potential fraudulent voters.
"I have discussed these records with the district attorney -- he's aware of them," Lehman replied to Mussare's inquiry.
"I haven't seen anything on these records that give me that impression and the reason for that is I've observed some of them have no vote history -- at all. Others do have a vote history, but in addition to that, in their history there were previous residential addresses in the county," Lehman explained.
"Some of them have had a fair amount of vote history and then it shows them potentially having moved away because we had an alternate address outside the county that we sent notices to and they never responded to that either through voter maintenance mailings," he added.
Because of their history as voters, Mussare said that he "wouldn't look at this as fraudulent."
Because the November 2020 election is the one that is often challenged, Lehman noted that of the total being challenged, only two persons voted in that election.
"The others don't have any history there and it looks like some of them probably moved away before that and never made a change," he said.
Lehman provided an overview of the process his department goes through in order to notify the voters of the challenge to the address they provided on the registration.
"We do provide them written notice. They've been sent several notices, actually, because these issues were brought to my attention before the primary that we had a small number of voters in the county who gave a post office address when they registered," he said.
"We could not do anything about it just before the primary there wasn't time to give due notice and due process to these folks," Lehman said.
He shared with the Board of Elections how the people were sent notices early last month and then again later in the month notifying them of Monday's hearing;. They were also provided with a copy of the petition that would be presented to the Board of Elections.
"Finally I did contact each of the properties, in other words the post offices and the UPS store, to verify that the voter registered there could not be found at that address, that they don't reside there," Lehman said.
"In every one of those circumstances the person confirmed that yes, this is a post office, that is a UPS store. This is not a place where a person can reside-it would not be possible," he said.
The people were given the opportunity to correct the record about their residential addresses. Originally there were two additional names on the list, but those voters did make the corrections.
"They responded to voter service and updated their addresses. But these 14 have not and so the last thing we were able to do was to give them notice that there would be a hearing at this date, at this time, in this location where I would be asking the Board of Elections to cancel the records if they don't correct the record before that," Lehman said.
The reason someone would give a post office box as the address on their voter registration, Lehman said, was they didn't know that was not a valid address or it could be a case where someone moves frequently and the post office box is a more permanent address.
"They didn't understand the residential requirement," he said.
The form for registering to vote does have a section where the voter puts their residential address and the a section for listing where they receive mail, which could be different.
"They have an opportunity to designate both and of course the communications we sent to the voter subsequently, there was a cover letter explaining this is an option you have if you need to you can designate any mailing address you like but you have to give us a residential address that's a house, a place where somebody is going to go to sleep at night. It can't be a post office," Lehman said.
When asked what do people who are homeless do when they want to register to vote, Lehman explained the procedure.
"What a homeless person can do and we have a few in the county who are in that situation and they have registered to vote," he said.
"They have an opportunity on the application form where they can actually draw a map. They can include a physical description of where they reside. Please nobody should take this flippantly, but if they come in and say I sleep under this bridge, you know that's where I'm at. That's where our 911 Center and our addressing is for. We can find that location and assign a physical 911 address to that and say, well if you're looking under the Market Street bridge we can put an address on that and register them that way," he stated.
Another possible scenario involves someone who is traveling in a recreational vehicle and knows they won't be in the same location for 30 days.
"A lot of that gets down to what is their circumstance and nobody knows that as well as them. They may have an intent to return to that place in which case if they're only traveling temporarily, but they're coming back they could still use that address for residential purposes," Lehman said.
"But, in a case like this, the problem is that the address is not a place where someone could reside. Unless someone had come in today and said, well I'm homeless and I sleep in front of the UPS store. Then we would be having a conversation about that," he added.