Trump and Musk Amplify Long-Ago Debunked Mail-In Vote Fraud Claim

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.

"This claim is based on mixing up statistics from the primary and the general election," Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, explained to us via email.