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With about a week to go before Election Day, officials from two Pennsylvania counties announced that they had found large batches of suspicious voter registration forms. While at least some of the documents appeared to be fraudulent, there is no indication that any of them are ballots, though officials clarified that they were continuing to investigate.

To hear former President Donald Trump’s telling, Pennsylvania’s election system was already melting down.

“They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster,” he said at a rally Tuesday night in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “Every vote was written by the same person.” He made similar allegations about York County, building on claims that he made on social media earlier in the day about “Really bad ‘stuff’” in the two counties. “Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!!” he insisted.

But contrary to Trump’s incendiary claim that fake ballots had been cast, there were no reports of actual ballots being among the two batches of documents. And on the ground, away from the high-strung channels of social media, law enforcement was already doing its job.

Neither a representative for the Trump campaign nor the state GOP immediately responded to requests for comment.

Thousands of voter registration forms, as well as some mail-in ballot applications, were submitted in large batches by out-of-state canvassing groups. Some of the paperwork raised suspicions among county election workers, and officials from both counties said any forms that appeared to be fraudulent would be turned over to local prosecutors.

In interviews, officials emphasized that this was all a sign that their election security protocols were working as designed.

“The system worked,” said Alice Yoder, one of three Lancaster County commissioners. She emphasized that not all of the registrations were fake, and that county officials were undertaking the laborious process of contacting people to sort them out.

“We caught this,” she said.

In an election that polls expect to be close, in which a few thousand Pennsylvania votes could make the difference, it doesn’t take much encouragement to inflame partisan tensions. Suspicions of potential foul play run deep, particularly in Pennsylvania, where county governments have substantial autonomy over how to apply the details of election law.

The first report of potential fraud in Lancaster County came when elections workers raised suspicions about roughly 2,500 registration forms that had been delivered by a canvassing group. Some forms contained inaccurate addresses or Social Security numbers. In some cases, the personal information on a form correctly matched a county resident but the resident told investigators they had not filled out any form.

“That should be disturbing to anybody,” said Ray D’Agostino, who is a Lancaster County commissioner and the chair of the elections board. “Now, the nice thing is, you know, we could say that people caught it. And we did. But it’s a problem that people tried to do this.”

While D’Agostino did not name the organization that had delivered the forms, and cautioned that the motive was still unclear, he did say the group of potentially fraudulent forms included both Democratic and Republican voters. In a statement, county officials said the canvassers involved had been paid to obtain voter registration applications.

In neighboring York County, officials became suspicious when a canvassing organization delivered a large box of election materials, including some mail-in ballot applications but mostly voter registration forms. Officials said that they are still examining the forms and would turn over any potentially fraudulent material to the county district attorney’s office. The Lancaster matter is already under investigation by its county district attorney’s office.

These were not the only episodes that have drawn attention, though they appear so far to be the most serious.

Last week, Lancaster County was drawing scrutiny from progressive voting-rights activists, as employees of Franklin & Marshall College, in the city of Lancaster, claimed that dozens of out-of state students who were trying to register to vote had been told that they had to prove they were not registered in their home states, a step the law does not require. The Pennsylvania secretary of state sent a sharply worded letter to the county, charging officials there with creating “a misconception” that was out of step with state and federal law.

D’Agostino flatly denied that students had been told they had to take that step, and said the registrations had all by now been processed. Yoder said likewise. But the outcry was so substantial that the county had at one point sent a “cease and desist” letter to the college, demanding it stop making claims against county employees, a local news outlet, the LNP, reported.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the disconnect between the way election officials and prominent partisans viewed election-related incidents was evident.

In Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, a woman was arrested at a polling place Monday. County officials, citing “multiple eyewitnesses,” said the woman, Val Biancaniello, had been “disruptive, belligerent and attempting to influence voters waiting in line,” and that several had complained to police officers on site.

But in a post Monday evening on the social platform X that has been viewed more than 3 million times, Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican National Committee, said Biancaniello was simply “encouraging people to stay in the early-voting line and cast their ballots freely” and called her arrest “voter suppression from the left.”

By Tuesday night, Whatley had posted a brief interview with Biancaniello, who was a delegate to the 2024 Republican convention. “If they can arrest me, it could be you next,” she said.

Yoder said she hoped politicians would give counties the space they need to deal with disruptions, and refrain from amplifying incomplete narratives on social media while the facts are still emerging. “When these messages go wild, that really sows doubt in our election,” she said. “To me, that’s dangerous. I’m hoping we can avoid that as much as possible.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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