The Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker who is behind the possible “forensic investigation” of the 2020 presidential election results claimed his Democratic opponents issued a “threat” to every county in response to his plan.
Last Wednesday, state Sen. Doug Mastriano requested “information and materials” from three counties within the commonwealth for his audit, and on Monday, he issued a statement accusing Democrats who are trying to “obstruct” his plan of having “issued a veiled threat” and of using “scare tactics.”
“What we are seeing is a convergence of scare tactics from [the] Wolf Administration and the Attorney General to intimidate county officials and obstruct a forensic investigation,” he said. “Governor Wolf and AG Shapiro are standing in the way of the constitutional authority of the General Assembly. For people who once lectured the state about transparency and accountability, we all ask, what do they have to hide?”
PENNSYLVANIA ELECTION AUDIT PRESENTS REPUBLICANS CHANCE TO WOO TRUMP
President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, and post-election audits by election officials showed no widespread fraud. Though the Trump campaign pursued several nationwide lawsuits alleging electoral irregularities, most of these suits were tossed by federal courts.
Mastriano sent the letters in his capacity as the chairman of the Intergovernmental Operations Committee to Philadelphia County, York County, and Tiago County and set a deadline of July 31 to comply, threatening to pursue subpoenas if they don’t.
The planned election investigation, which will also look at the 2021 primary, is similar to the forensic audit wrapping up in Maricopa County, Arizona, a Senate-led investigation that has attracted complaints from both local and federal officials. The Justice Department is poised to crack down on Arizona’s investigation before auditors release their findings later this summer.
Pennsylvania acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Veronica Degraffenreid said in a directive last Thursday that complying with Mastriano’s request could result in a decertification of the equipment and said the state “will not reimburse any cost of replacement voting equipment for which certification or use authority has been withdrawn pursuant to this directive.”
Mastriano, who has said Trump encouraged him to run for governor in 2022, argued that the memo amounted to a “threat disguised as a ‘directive,'” and he questioned whether Degraffenreid was acting “outside of the scope of her constitutional powers.”
A spokesperson for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf told the Washington Examiner that his office “will stand up to any attempt to disrupt our electoral process and undermine our elections,” while Pennsylvania’s Department of State warned counties against allowing “third-party entities” access to voting machines.
Mastriano also rebuked Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who previously accused the state senator of “pay[ing] homage to former President Trump and further spread[ing] misinformation about our elections.”
“Attorney General Shapiro has made numerous tv appearances and social media statements to threaten costly legal action and make baseless claims about how much an investigation would cost to taxpayers,” Mastriano stated. “Perhaps the AG’s time could be better spent on important law enforcement issues rather than nightly CNN/MSNBC appearances, childish name calling, and tweets of incessant broad, yet empty platitudes.”
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Trump, people in his orbit, and his acolytes have hailed the efforts of Arizona’s GOP-controlled Senate that successfully used subpoenas to obtain ballots and other election materials for the audit after a favorable ruling from a judge. They have also pushed for copycat audits, including in Pennsylvania, among other battleground states that Biden won.
Some of these other states seem poised to follow suit, with Republicans in Georgia and Wisconsin actively pushing for similar audits with the former president’s blessing.
