Cliff Maloney is the founder of Pennsylvania Chase, a door-knocking, “ballot chasing” operation meant to encourage conservative voters in that crucial swing state to return mail-in ballots. The 32-year-old is also, of late, the face of a particularly bumbling public attempt to root out supposed illegal voting—one that, despite him having already been heartily scolded by a group of nuns for intimating they were involved in election fraud, he’s largely refusing to retreat from.
As one nun wrote, “His insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet.”
As has been widely reported, Maloney tweeted on October 22 that one of his organization’s staff members visited an address in Pennsylvania where 53 voters are registered.
“Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote, adding, “Our attorney’s [sic] are reviewing this right now. We will not let the Dems count on illegal votes.” The post has been viewed 2.8 million times, and also featured repeatedly in Twitter/X’s conspiracy-addled “Election Integrity” community.
But the Benedictine Sisters of Erie do live there, and the very next day the nuns issued a sternly-worded press release in which their prioress, Sister Stephanie Schmidt, pointed out that Maloney could have done the barest amount of due diligence before accusing the nuns of nonexistence, voter fraud, or a puzzling combination of the two.
“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,” Schmidt said, per the release. “A free republic depends on free and fair elections. It depends equally on a discerning and conscientious citizenry who do not unquestioningly accept the word of anyone who has a social media platform.”
When reached for comment by Mother Jones on November 1, Maloney refused to admit any error, and insisted that a “staff member”—possibly a receptionist, he thought, “or whatever the politically correct term is these days”—at the monastery had deceived his ballot chaser into believing no one lived on the property as part of a deliberate plot “to paint [Pennsylvania Chase] as ‘election deniers.’”
“Did you ask the nuns why their staff member lied?,” he wrote in a Twitter direct message. “Not one reporter has included that in their story. Sad, really.”
Maloney repeatedly referred to the sisters as “the pro trans, pro Ukraine group,” and didn’t directly respond to my efforts to clarify why. (The Benedictine Sisters of Erie have hosted sister nuns from Ukraine to speak about religious life in a country under siege. A handful of them also joined a “read-in” supporting a local library after it faced complaints over stocking LGBTQ+ children’s books.)
“I’m Catholic,” he explained at one juncture, adding that he used to sing in a campus choir. “They are nuns. The problem is their staffer bold face lying. No one wants to report that.”
When reached for comment on Maloney’s latest claims, Sister Linda Romey OSB, the monastery’s coordinator of communications and development, reiterated to Mother Jones that no one would have told ballot chaser that “no one lives” in the place where they live. “Our receptionists are our sisters,” she explained. “And there is no sister who would say no one lives at the monastery where we have been living since we built it in the late 1960s. We have been in Erie since 1856.”
“None of our sisters had such an interaction with the canvasser,” she continued. “If he had come in and spoken with a sister he would most likely have been invited to prayer and possibly a meal—hospitality is one of our values.”
“That said,” Sister Romey added, “even if Mr. Maloney’s canvasser did come into our monastery (which means he was buzzed in) and spoke with someone, I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood. But even so, once the misinformation was corrected, the appropriate thing for Mr. Maloney to do would have been to simply acknowledge the error and post an apology for the accusation and for violating our sisters privacy by posting their personal information online.”
“I suppose it is possible that he has hearing issues and maybe misunderstood.”
‘Mr. Maloney can insist all he wants but his insisting does not change reality, at least not on this planet,” she told Mother Jones. “It is an outright falsehood that he continues [to] promote… The fact is that PA CHASE and Mr. Maloney cannot admit they made a mistake and take responsibility for posting misinformation. It’s that simple.”
Maloney claims that, in the wake of his post about the monastery and the blowback that followed, his ballot chasers have been subject to threats and “defamation,” as he put it, at the hands of media organizations. “Death threats… vile comments,” he wrote. (Ellipses his.) “The uniparty is unhinged.”
“It’s a lynching of Republican ballot chasers and I won’t stand for it,” he wrote.
Pennsylvania Chase is sponsored by the Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, whose funders include libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in the state, a longtime Rand Paul supporter who has thrown his financial weight behind electing Donald Trump. (He also owns a stake in TikTok.) Pennsylvania Chase has set ambitious goals to increase Republican turnout, with support from characters like Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Maloney is not unfamiliar with controversy; as The Spectator recently reported, he was previously the president of Young Americans for Liberty, a right-wing student group, before being removed from that position in 2021 over allegations of sexual misconduct against him and other leaders. Maloney denied those allegations at the time; as Spectator reporter Jacqueline Sweet noted, he also “voluntarily surrendered his Pennsylvania teaching credentials” after being charged in 2022 with raping a first-year student at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown in 2013 when he was a resident assistant there; a jury acquitted him last year of four counts, and the other two were dismissed by a judge after the jury could not reach a verdict on them.
