Letter to the editor: Election deserves scrutiny

I’m a Westmoreland County precinct election judge. On Nov. 3, one honest voter turned in duplicate mail-in ballots to be voided and vote in person. I mentioned this to another election judge while standing in line to turn in results that night and discovered it wasn’t unusual. This may be one reason why Westmoreland County took most of the month of November to carefully count all valid ballots and, I’d assume, exclude those which were not. And if there were honest voters who received and turned in duplicate ballots, it is not a far stretch to suppose there were dishonest voters who didn’t.

All of Pennsylvania is not Westmoreland County. Philadelphia, to name one example, got large ballot drops at odd hours long after the polls had closed, counted them and reported them as proper votes. Were they? Since independent observers were excluded, nobody can say for sure, but the fact that they didn’t take the time our Westmoreland County people did to carefully review and separate certainly raises suspicions.

We spent years and millions of dollars reviewing Russian collusion claims from the 2016 election with much less basis in fact than the foregoing. We can afford to spend two months investigating the relative handful of large locations which did not count ballots in the same careful manner as smaller Westmoreland County does.

David Staples

Unity