Local activist behind Lancaster County overseas ballot challenges

A Denver woman who attended meetings of a pro-Trump election denial group is the person who challenged the votes of 723 overseas voters from Lancaster County.

The agenda for the county Board of Elections meeting scheduled for Friday showed Seeran Mizii is behind the challenges.

Mizii attended all four PA Fair Elections meetings held in June, according to data obtained during a month-long review of the group by LNP | LancasterOnline.

Mizii did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

With ties to powerful conservative groups, PA Fair Elections was behind largely failed efforts this year to remove voters from voting rolls. Mizii and another PA Fair Elections member tried to observe Lancaster County’s testing of voting machines, but didn’t show up after LNP | LancasterOnline reported on it.

County officials said earlier this week that Mizii’s challenges to the overseas voters were filed within an hour of last Friday’s 5 p.m. deadline.

An unnamed representative of the PA Fair Elections on Saturday denied that the group was behind any of the challenges to voters filed in 15 or so counties across Pennsylvania. Other known figures in Pennsylvania’s election denial movement filed challenges in Chester and Lycoming counties, according to reports.

Republican state Sens. Cris Dush and Jarrett Coleman, who supported the work of the election denial movement over the last four years, filed challenges in other counties, including Lehigh and Centre.

Coleman and Dush have withdrawn most or all of their challenges as recently as Wednesday, hours after former President Donald Trump was declared winner of Tuesday’s election.

READ: Federal judge hears arguments in ‘creative’ GOP challenge to overseas ballots

READ: Election denial group ‘PA Fair Elections’ a no-show at voting machine testing

READ: ‘PA Fair Elections,’ tied to powerful conservative groups, behind efforts to remove people from voter rolls

Federal voters

The Lancaster County Board of Elections hearing to adjudicate the challenges is scheduled for 9 a.m. Friday. At the hearing, it will be on Mizii to prove her case that the voters she identified were not legally allowed to participate in this year’s presidential election.

The overseas voters who were challenged are “federal voters,” a class of voters established by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Under the law, American citizens who live permanently in other countries can vote for federal offices, including president. Their voter registration is tied to their last stateside residential address.

Though the law has been in place for nearly 40 years, it became a target of lawsuits and legal challenges by Republicans this year. None of those attempts has been successful.

Overseas Pennsylvania voters are overwhelmingly registered Democrats, outnumbering Republicans by almost a factor of six statewide.

A review of Pennsylvania Department of State data listed 720 overseas voters who had successfully requested a ballot with the Lancaster County elections office, just three fewer than the Mizii’s number of challenges.

Of those voters, 470 were Democrats, outnumbering the 113 Republicans by four to one.

As of Wednesday, Trump had won a convincing victory, including the popular vote, in another U.S. election in which no major or credible instances of widespread election fraud had been reported.

Trump’s commanding lead in Pennsylvania means that the fate of the overseas votes would have no effect on the outcome. Even in the U.S. Senate race, where the Republican candidate David McCormick held a narrow lead of 30,000 votes against incumbent Sen. Bob Casey, the approximately 4,000 overseas ballots that were challenged last week could not change the outcome.