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Are 53 voters registered at an Erie, Pennsylvania, address where no one lives? No, that's not true: The address corresponds to a monastery. The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have said publicly that they live there.
The claim appeared in an article (archived here) on X on October 22, 2024, on the official X account of Cliff Mahoney, leader of The Pennsylvania Chase campaign. The post, which included a video of a list of voters, was captioned:
BREAKING: a member of the PA CHASE discovered an address in Erie, PA today where 53 voters are registered.
Turns out it's the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there.
We knocked on the door because a Republican mail-in ballot is unreturned.
Our attorney's are reviewing this right now.
We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Oct 24 14:41:09 2024 UTC)
Despite the post's claim about the supposedly vacant address, the Benedictine Sisters of Erie live at the address shown on the list of voters in the post. The address is 6101 E Lake Road in Erie, Pennsylvania. Lead Stories used Google to search for the address (archived here) and confirmed that the monastery is located there.
Lead Stories contacted the Sisters for comment on the claim. We received a written statement dated October 23, 2024 (also found online here (archived here)] which read in part:
'We want to call Cliff Mahoney to account for his blatantly false post that accuses our sisters of fraud. We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie. We also want to alert those who subscribe to X and other social media platforms to be vigilant and seek additional information before accepting these posts as truth,' said Sister Stephanie Schmidt, prioress.
Additionally, the names of the voters in the video included in the post that made the claim match a list of the Sisters available online (archived here).
Lead Stories received an email on October 24, 2024, from Amy Gulli, director of communications for the Pennsylvania Department of State, which administers election procedures. Gulli informed us that Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt called the prioress of the Sisters, Stephanie Schmidt (no relation), on October 24, 2024, to thank her for "standing up against election disinformation." Gulli shared an additional statement from Sec. Schmidt:
'Those of us in election administration have been urging people to rely only on trusted sources of information. The good Sisters are definitely trusted sources,' Secretary Schmidt said. 'I thank them for courageously speaking up about being the targets of fraudulent claims regarding their voter eligibility. They have turned a regrettable experience into an opportunity to remind all of us to be "discerning and conscientious" consumers of election information.'
Other Lead Stories fact checks related to the 2024 U.S. general election can be found here.
Updates:
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2024-10-24T20:16:09Z 2024-10-24T20:16:09ZAdded online version of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie's statement and added statement from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
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