Insurrectionist Pennsylvania Legislator Demands an Arizona-style “Fraudit”

The malignant cancer of Arizona Republican’s GQP sham “fraudit” has spread to Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, A key Pa. Republican asks counties to hand over ballots and election equipment for an Arizona-style ‘audit’:

Eight months after the 2020 election, a key Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker is heeding former President Donald Trump’s demands for investigations into his false claims of fraud.

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a likely gubernatorial candidate [and sure loser] a leading election denialist in the state, sent letters Wednesday to multiple counties seeking election-related equipment and materials “needed to conduct a forensic investigation” of the 2020 election and the 2021 primary.

Mastriano sent the letters to Philadelphia, York, and Tioga  Counties, he said Wednesday. “We’re looking at three counties, and if sufficient evidence comes up with shenanigans and corruption or fraud, then we’ll have a second round with additional counties,” he said on the pro-Trump cable network OAN.

Philadelphia officials confirmed the city received a letter but declined to comment further on the requests.

Mastriano’s requests are sprawling and include essentially all election-related materials, such as ballots, mail ballot applications, mail ballot envelopes, voting machines, ballot scanners and vote-counting equipment, ballot production equipment, poll books, and computer equipment used throughout the election process.

The letters warn that the Senate committee Mastriano leads may issue subpoenas if counties don’t respond by July 31 with a “plan to comply.”

It’s not clear how Mastriano’s investigation would work. Basic questions that were unanswered Wednesday included where equipment and ballots would be stored securely, who would be involved and have access, what training those people would have, what standards and procedures they would follow, and what documentation would be required during the review.

Depending on what Mastriano is looking for, it may also be too late: Election equipment is reused, so voting machines used at polling places in 2020 were reprogrammed for the May primary. Doh!

Mastriano said his investigation will model the Arizona review. “It’s much of what we saw in Arizona, which really set the standard on a forensic analysis,” he said on OAN [the Trump propaganda network].

Pennsylvania already conducted a “risk-limiting” audit in 63 of its 67 counties. Counties are also required by law to audit a sample of ballots. There is no evidence of significant fraud in Pennsylvania’s election.

Unlike in Arizona, where our Republican “Wimpy Kid” Governor and partisan hack Attorney General allowed the Arizona Senate to hire a QAnon conspiracy theorist to conduct an illegal GQP sham “fraudit,” Pennsylvania’s top state officials who are all Democrats are not going to tolerate this Big Lie QAnon election theft conspiracy shit from Republican state senators.

A Mastriano-led investigation is almost certain to prompt legal challenges from Democratic-led counties or state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat and likely candidate for governorwho has said he would seek to block an Arizona-style review.

“[S]hould subpoenas be issued, you can expect our office to do everything to protect the Commonwealth, its voters, and the free, fair election that was held in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro tweeted Wednesday. He called on counties to “refuse to participate in this partisan fishing expedition.”

This is what Arizona’s partisan hack Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, should have done months ago.

It remains to be seen how the three counties will respond. Philadelphia elections officials pushed back on the claims Mastriano made in his letter. Nick Custodio, a deputy under city elections chief Lisa Deeley, said in a statement that “the repetition of baseless claims by elected officials poses a real challenge to our democratic processes.”

Mastriano’s requests would significantly disrupt any county elections office and likely make it difficult to run November’s election. Election preparation begins long before the first vote is cast, and if a review takes months, like in Arizona, that could prevent a county from using its equipment.

It could also render equipment unusable in the future. Unless specific chain-of-custody protocols are followed and access is limited, it’s considered a major security vulnerability to give third parties access to election equipment. In Arizona, Maricopa County will buy new equipment after its review. And in Pennsylvania, Fulton County already had to get new voting machines after an audit that Mastriano had a hand in.

That audit was funded by a nonprofit led by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, the Krazy Kraken Lady and prominent election conspiracy theorist.

It remains to be seen how Mastriano’s investigation would be funded. Senate Republican leaders have ruled out using taxpayer money, and Mastriano led a private briefing last week with his caucus to discuss the possibility of seeking private funding for the probe, the Associated Press reported.

* * *

Not all Pennsylvania Republicans are on board with Mastriano’s plan. State Rep. Seth Grove (R, York), House Republicans’ point person on election issues, has said he opposes the idea.

But an investigation threatens to plunge the GOP into months of 2020 revisionism and further alienate swing voters. That could have implications both for the governor’s race and Pennsylvania’s high-stakes U.S. Senate election in 2022.

It would also almost certainly create more confusion around the 2020 election and suspicion of Pennsylvania’s election system generally, despite Mastriano’s claim that an investigation would calm public distrust.

[T]he concerns about election integrity have been largely driven by Trump’s election lies — and Republicans’ amplification of them.

Two top Senate Democrats asked Republican leaders to step in and stop Mastriano, calling the review an “unlawful witch hunt.”

”This is nothing more than an attempt to appease the disgruntled supporters of former President Donald Trump and serve as a campaign vehicle for Senator Mastriano to advance his run for Governor,” Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) and Sen. Anthony H. Williams (D., Philadelphia), the minority chair of the Intergovernmental Operations Committee, wrote Wednesday in a letter to top Senate Republicans.

”We urge you to issue a cease and desist order for this member of the chamber before he does even more damage to the credibility of government institutions,” they wrote. “His behavior over the last six months has eroded the integrity of the State Senate and it must be stopped.”

Mastriano, a retired Army colonel from Franklin County in south-central Pennsylvania, has amplified conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden’s electoral victory and met with Trump personally in New York this spring. He is an insurrectionist who traveled to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol attack, and paid for buses to take other Trump supporters.

Mastriano has said he left the Capitol area before rioters stormed the building, but video evidence unearthed by online sleuths in May appears to show he stuck around longer and got closer to the Capitol than he has previously acknowledged.

See, New videos appear to show state Senator Doug Mastriano closer to Capitol insurrection than he said.

#SeditionHunters – today's #SeditionVIP & flat-out liar is PA State Sen #IamDougMastriano: “When it was apparent that this was no longer a peaceful protest, my wife and I left…at no point did we…go beyond police lines." But here he is, AND mixed up in the NE barrier breach 1/ https://t.co/btnHhil7hN pic.twitter.com/hOsl0u5Njz

— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters) May 22, 2021

Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf weighed in today. A Pa. Republican lawmaker’s push for another 2020 election audit is a ‘disgrace to democracy,’ Wolf says:

Gov. Tom Wolf on Thursday called it a “disgrace to democracy” that a Republican state lawmaker is trying to launch what he calls a “forensic investigation” of Pennsylvania’s 2020 presidential election, similar to the widely criticized partisan review in Arizona.

Wolf, a Democrat, said on Twitter that the “sham election audit” being attempted by State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin) is also a “profound waste of time and taxpayer money.”

Are you paying attention Governor Ducey? This is what a real “big boy” governor sounds like.

Wolf’s administration has discouraged counties from cooperating, saying they risk decertifying their voting machines and costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

Also Thursday, Democratic state senators wrote to officials in Philadelphia and two other counties to tell them that they should not comply with Mastriano’s requests for election-related equipment and materials.

The four Democratic members of the committee chaired by Mastriano said in the letter that elections are not in the purview of the Intergovernmental Operations Committee.

Donald Trump’s Big Lie and QAnon election theft conspiracy theory bullshit needs to end with the idiot Republicans in Arizona, and not spread to idiot Republicans in other states.