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Pennsylvania State Senate Republicans held their first hearing in what they call a “Forensic investigation” in last year’s presidential election, a disappointing deal that Democrats say is nonetheless a continuation of a nationwide campaign to attack voting rights in the wake of the loss of former President Donald Trump.
Republicans argue that the investigation is not about Trump or the cancellation of the election, but rather looking at issues related to the last two elections – in May and November – and trying to resolve those issues.
He was hotly pressed by Republican senators who pledged to hold an Arizona-style election “Audit” in Pennsylvania, but sowed discord within the Republican Senate caucus and drew sharp criticism from Democrats.
They say it’s a perversion of Senate rules and an effort to undermine the state’s voting rights and postal voting law, in the service of Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him .
Republicans seem to want to use the committee as “Great committee to spread their rhetoric and amplify the rhetoric of distortion and chase every rabbit hole in conspiracy theory that has been discredited to date,” said Sen. Anthony Williams, Democratic chair of the Philadelphia committee.
Senator Steve Santarsiero, D-Bucks, called it “Is part of a well-organized and well-funded national effort to question the outcome of last year’s election so that it can then be the means of denying people the freedom to vote by amending our electoral laws.”
It’s unclear what the investigation will look like, but the top Republican Senator, Pro Tempore President Jake Corman, has pledged to issue subpoenas for information or voting machines and ballots, as happened during the widely discredited election audit organized by Republicans in the Arizona Senate.
The subject of the hearing was to discuss pre-election guidance to counties by the administration of Democratic Governor Tom Wolf on how to handle aspects of the state’s brand new mail-in ballot law.
The subject is already a plowed field, having been explored during a State House committee hearing in January.
Today’s witness list was short: a sparsely populated Fulton County Republican County Commissioner.
The commissioner sparked particularly heated questions from Democrats because Fulton County – in cooperation with Trump allies – allowed a software company to inspect its voting machines as part of a “Audit” after the 2020 elections.
Commissioner Stuart Ulsh said trying to keep up with updates to state guidance had been “confusing” and “crushing” for its small staff.
In a written testimony it submitted, the Pennsylvania County Commissioners Association mainly blamed changes in state guidance to counties on a lawsuit crush against the postal voting law provisions.
Officials from many of the most populous counties in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, have bluntly said they were not invited to testify.
Officials from Wolf’s State Department, which oversees the Pennsylvania election, declined to testify. The testimony would relate to a lawsuit brought against the agency by state lawmakers seeking to overturn the postal voting law, a spokesperson said.
Committee chair Senator Cris Dush R-Jefferson read aloud the questions he wanted to ask agency officials, but did not say whether he would seek subpoenas.
In a letter to Dush, Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid said agency officials had repeatedly testified on electoral matters before House and Senate committees this year. This includes testifying before the Special Senate Committee on Election Integrity and Reform, which produced a report on the elections, as does a House committee.
In any case, the audience hardly dwelled on the pre-electoral orientations.
Rather, Democrats have repeatedly questioned Ulsh about who paid for the audit. Ulsh said he didn’t know, only that the taxpayers hadn’t paid for it. Democrats on the panel asked him to find out and provide the answer.
They later asked how he could not be aware of a county document indicating that the software company – which worked for a while on the Arizona audit – had been contracted out to a group called Defending the Republic.
The group is led by Sidney Powell, a Trump ally lawyer who has filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results and helped fund the Arizona election audit.
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