During a streamed update on election matters Tuesday, Schmidt said his agency “is pleased that this frivolous lawsuit was dismissed.”

Conner said the plaintiffs were asking “to impose new verification procedures the contours of which plaintiffs themselves have been unable to fully flesh out three weeks into this litigation.” He said an injunction now “would upend the commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters.”

During oral arguments on Oct. 18, Conner asked why the plaintiffs had not sued earlier over procedures that have been in place for years. He also pressed their lawyers to show how their clients were directly harmed by the current policies, as required for such claims.

The order issued Tuesday said the Republican congressmen had only “hypothetical concerns” about the impact overseas votes might have on their own reelection contests.

“Their status as candidates, without more, gets them nowhere,” the judge wrote.

The case could have affected thousands of ballots in Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state in the presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

The plaintiffs had asked the judge to declare current practices illegal under federal law and to order that the secretary of state’s office confer with the congressmen and PA Fair Elections about how to verify the identity and eligibility of people casting votes under the U.S. Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. They also asked to have overseas and military ballots segregated during the current election season pending the additional verification.

Lawyers for Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, representing Schmidt and his deputy, had argued that the plaintiffs were saying valid votes could be diluted by improper ones, which they said would not be sufficient grounds for the judge to act. They said federal laws exempt overseas voters “from identification requirements imposed on other voters who register to vote by mail.”

Military voters are more likely to be Republican, while other overseas voters tend to lean Democratic. The Democratic Party is spending money this year in an effort to boost their turnout.

York County in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania is looking into an “overabundance” of voter registration forms and requests for mail ballots that were sent to the elections office after another county received thousands of voter registration forms that were flagged for potential fraud.

The York County elections office received a “large delivery containing thousands of election-related materials from a third-party organization,” including voter registration forms and mail-ballot applications, York County president commissioner Julie Wheeler said in a statement to the York Daily Record.

“As with all submissions, our staff follows a process for ensuring all voter registrations and mail-in ballot requests are legal. That process is currently underway. If suspected fraud is identified, we will alert the District Attorney’s Office, which will then conduct an investigation.”

Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground in next week’s election, and both Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are seeking the state’s 19 electoral votes in what polls indicate is an extremely close contest.

Wheeler told Fox 43 on Monday: “It’s not unusual to get large stacks of voter registrations or large stacks of requests for mail-in ballots, it’s just this was an overabundance of registrations from one particular organization.”

She added: “We need to do our homework before we go and make accusations when we don’t have the data to back it up.”

Wheeler has been contacted for further comment via email.

Wheeler’s comments come as an investigation is underway in Lancaster County, where officials said fraudulent voter registrations had been found among 2,500 forms that arrived at the county elections office shortly before Pennsylvania’s October 21 deadline to register to vote.

Election workers had “noticed that numerous applications appeared to have the same handwriting, were filled out on the same day with unknown signature, and some were previously registered voters (…) and the signatures on file did not match the signatures on the application,” Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams, an elected Republican, said at a news conference on Friday.

About 60 percent of the applications that have been investigated so far have been identified as fraudulent, Adams said, though she did not disclose the total number of applications that have been investigated fully. Her office has been contacted for comment via email.

Adams said issues with the applications included false names, false personal identification information and inaccurate addresses.

“In some cases, applications contained correct personal identification information, such as the correct address, correct phone number, date of birth, driver’s license number and Social Security number but the individuals listed on the applications informed detectives that they did not request the form,” she said. “They did not complete the form and verified that the signature on the form was not theirs.”

She said it is believed that the fraudulent registrations are connected to a “large-scale canvassing operation” dating back to June. However, she said most of the applications date from August 15 and a majority were from residents in Lancaster.

It “appears to be an organized effort at this point,” Adams said, but noted the investigation is ongoing. “We’ll be looking into who exactly participated in it and how far up it goes,” she said.

Adams said two other counties, which she did not name, had received similar applications that are under investigation.

Trump did not directly mention the controversy during his appearances in Georgia Monday, instead choosing to parry another critique of him — that his former White House chief of staff reports that Trump as president said he wished he had “German generals.” The Harris campaign has seized on the comment and the vice president, in a radio interview last week, agreed that Trump was “a fascist.”

During a Monday night rally at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Trump instead called Harris a “fascist” and said: “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.”

Trump also warned that Michelle Obama made a “big mistake” by being “nasty” to him in a recent speech.

During his first appearance of the day, a National Faith Summit in Powder Springs, Georgia, conservative activist Gary Bauer asked a question that included offhand praise for Trump turning Madison Square Garden “into MAGA Square Garden.”

“Great night,” Trump replied.

Trump’s vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance, was asked about the insult during an appearance in Wausau, Wisconsin.

“Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, as you said. Maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it. I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke,” Vance said. “But I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing.”

The Harris campaign released an ad that will run online in battleground states targeting Puerto Rican voters and highlighting the comedian’s remarks. The comments landed Harris a show of support from Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny and prompted reactions from Republicans in Florida and in Puerto Rico.

Hinchcliffe also made demeaning jokes about Black people, other Latinos, Palestinians and Jews in his routine before Trump’s appearance. On Monday in Pittsburgh, Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, delivered remarks on antisemitism in America, a day after the anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre.

“There is a fire in this country, and we either pour water on it or we pour gasoline on it,” Emhoff said.

Still, it was Hinchliffe’s quip about Puerto Rico that drew the most attention, partly due to the geography of the election.

From Labor Day to this past weekend, both campaigns have made more visits to Pennsylvania than to Georgia, Arizona and Nevada combined, according to Associated Press tracking of the campaigns’ public events. The state has some of the fastest-growing Hispanic communities, including in Reading and Allentown, where more than half of the population is Hispanic.

Pennsylvania’s Latino eligible voter population has more than doubled since 2000, from 206,000 to 620,000 in 2023, according to Census Bureau figures. More than half of those are Puerto Rican eligible voters.