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HARRISBURG – Capitol Republican lawmakers are pushing to gather personal information about all registered Pennsylvania voters, as well as a lot of communications between state and county election officials, as part of a controversial investigation into the 2020 presidential election.
Republican lawmakers have issued a comprehensive citation, shared with Spotlight PA on Tuesday afternoon, requesting all communications between state election officials and election officials from all counties, as well as the name, address, and address. partial social security number of all voters. registered last November.
The citation, which is scheduled to vote before a Senate committee Wednesday morning, is likely to face the backlash of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, as well as Democrats in the legislature that have characterized Republican Party efforts as baseless partisan attacks aimed at undermining President Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.
But Republicans who control the state Senate say they believe a thorough review needs to be done because of the evolution of state guidelines last year in counties on how to handle email and other voting and to make sure not there would have been irregularities in last year’s election, even though Republican Party legislative leaders have acknowledged they have no evidence of fraud.
“We saw an extraordinary number of changes, orientations and clarifications and modifications of that orientation before the election,” said Jason Thompson, spokesman for Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Center). “Some aspects of this orientation seemed partisan to us.”
In an email to Spotlight PA, Wolf spokeswoman Lyndsay Kensinger said administration officials have not yet received a subpoena. But he said they “continue to strongly oppose any effort that compromises the safety and integrity of election materials and infrastructure and undermines confidence in our election by bringing a circus to Arizona to Pennsylvania.”
Thompson, Corman’s spokesman, said Republicans are ready to fight any litigation from the Wolf administration or others to the state’s highest court, a likely and costly process that could delay the investigation months or so. month.
The responsibility for combing the thousands of documents that could potentially be dumped from the citation would fall on the staff and lawyers of the Senate intergovernmental operations committee, which heads the review. There is no set budget for their research, which critics say will cost taxpayers unnecessarily millions of dollars.
Senator Cris Dush, a Conservative senator from the Jefferson County GOP, leads the audit. Corman selected Dush for the effort in August, after a dramatic fallout with Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin) who had been the most vocal advocate in Pennsylvania for a “forensic audit” similar to the much criticized in Maricopa County, Arizona. .
When in office, Mastriano had threatened to issue his own summonses to search for election materials from three counties, including Philadelphia, but the orders never materialized.
Last week, Dush convened a hearing during which Republican senators questioned the actions and motivations of state election officials to issue guidelines to counties just days before the November election.
But the citation provides the first concrete look at the reach of the Republican Party review, even as Republicans have recently struggled to articulate what exactly the investigation would include.
At the citation, Dush and other Republicans seek copies of any State Department guidance from county election administrators; all training material used to prepare county-level election workers to count votes; information about Pennsylvanians who voted during the primary and general election; and any changes made to the electoral rolls.
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