“My vote does count and it does matter,” small business owner Debbie McGinley told the three-member commission. She added that she doesn’t feel like she can trust the election process in Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia, anymore.

“I would hope that everyone sitting up there would have election integrity and that we can figure this out,” she said. “But no, I don’t trust anyone. No, I don’t actually trust the elections. I don’t trust a lot of stuff. So I hope as a citizen, as a taxpayer, as a business owner that we can basically get our act together because we have an election coming up – a primary – and we have another election again in four years. …This is about the people and we the people want our ballots to count.”   

Republican Joe Rittenhouse told commissioners they “sowed distrust in our elections” while Michelle Miller accused them of “putting on a real dog and pony show.”

Monday’s super-sized meeting follows a similar one in neighboring Bucks County last week, where Republican voters blasted commissioners for openly defying the Pennsylvania Supreme Court order to stop counting undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots in the race between Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and his Republican challenger, David McCormick. Casey conceded Thursday in the middle of a statewide recount in the hotly contested battleground. McCormick’s win padded the GOP’s newly won Senate majority in Congress. 

Montgomery and Bucks County were among four in the Keystone state where local election officials were accused of ignoring the high court ruling. 

Republicans insisted Democrats fall in line with the court and toss the ballots with missing or incorrect information. Democrats argued they should be counted and that not doing so would create an unfair advantage.

Democrat-majority election boards in Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Bucks counties had initially voted to count the ballots that lacked a correct date, echoing some election officials around the state who argued the date told them nothing about a voter’s eligibility or a ballot’s legitimacy. Voters like Rittenhouse and more than a dozen others who signed up to speak on Monday cried foul.

“This was never about empowering voters or strengthening our democracy,” Rittenhouse said. “This was about consolidating power into a very small minority of people and disenfranchising the rest of us.” 

Rittenhouse said the writing was on the wall when Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro told county officials to follow the Pennsylvania Supreme Court guidance. 

“The court has now ruled on the counting of these ballots specific to the November 5, 2024 election and I expect all county election officials to adhere to this ruling and all the applicable laws governing our elections,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Neil Makhija, Montgomery County Commissioner and Chair of the Board of Elections, at times pushed back on speakers accusing the board of trying to sway the outcome of the election. He also brought up President-elect Donald Trump’s numerous attempts after the 2020 election to overturn the results.

“We are not counting misdated and undated ballots for this election,” he said. “I want to count the votes of every lawful, eligible, registered voter. I am also curious how many of you had a problem when the former president lost 60 legal cases in court trying to overturn the election.” 

While most of the speakers at Monday’s Montgomery County meeting trashed the commissioners, a few spoke in support. 

Joseph Alston, a newly naturalized citizen from Germany who lived as an undocumented migrant in the United States for 40 years, said the only reason he became a citizen was so he “could vote and become among the counted.”

“As citizens we should all want every legally registered vote counted and certified as we should also note that no system is perfect,” he said.