Claims about 180,000 Amish registered voters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are farfetched

The math isn’t adding up in a viral social media claim about Amish voter registration. 

There have been "180,000 registered New Amish voters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania," an Oct. 21 X post claims.

We saw this figure being shared on Instagram, too. "Amish preacher reported back to me and says there's 180,000 new Amish registered voters," text on an Oct. 19 Instagram video claimed. 

The Instagram video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram.)

The Amish are a Protestant Chrisitian denomination who first came to the U.S. in the mid-1700s fleeing persecution in Europe. There are Amish settlements in several U.S. states.

But the claim about 180,000 Amish voter registration is mathematically impossible. 

Pennsylvania has the largest population of Amish people in the U.S., but the total number stands at about 93,000, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. The center, based in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, studies Amish life in North America. This 93,000 estimate includes children who are not eligible to register to vote.

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Lancaster County has 366,000 registered voters as of Oct. 28, state records show. About 38,000 Amish people live in the county, according to the latest population count taken in early summer 2024 and shared with PolitiFact by Steven Nolt, a history and Anabaptist studies professor and director of the Young Center. Of the 38,000, more than half are younger than 18, thus ineligible to vote.

"The claim is completely false," Nolt said in an email. "The rough number of potential eligible Amish voters (age 18 and up) in Lancaster County, even if every single eligible Amish voter was registered (100%), would be about 17,000 people max."

In 2020, 4,125 Amish adults registered out of nearly 17,000 eligible Amish people in Lancaster County, according to a 2023 study published by the Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities. Of that figure, 2,940 people voted, the study said. Nolt said it was unlikely there would be a dramatic change in the 2024 election. 

"It would still undoubtedly be a minority of eligible Amish voters, given the church’s longstanding discouragement of voting," Nolt said.

We asked the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees the commonwealth’s elections, whether it had records on Amish voter registration. The agency said it does not collect such information. The state’s voter registration form does not ask about religious identity.

Amy Gulli, a Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson, told NewsGuard, a company tracking online misinformation, that claims about 180,000 new Amish voter registrations in 2024 in Pennsylvania were "misinformation and disinformation." 

We rate this claim that 180,000 Amish people registered to vote in Lancaster, Pennsylvania False.