GOP fight over 2020 election audit brews
HARRISBURG — A key member of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives is flatly rejecting talk of any sort of audit of the 2020 presidential election, a day after three fellow Republican state lawmakers toured the Arizona Senate GOP’s audit.
Rep. Seth Grove, R-York, who chairs the committee that handles election matters, said on Twitter on Thursday that the chamber “will not be authorizing any further audits on any previous election.”
Two of those visiting lawmakers, Sens. Cris Dush and Doug Mastriano, say they want something similar carried out in Pennsylvania.
They will have trouble getting anything through Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, who dismissed their trip to Arizona as an “effort to discredit the integrity of our elections” and “an insult to our county election workers and to Pennsylvania voters.”
“As counties call on the General Assembly to act on election reform, GOP state lawmakers are chasing conspiracy theories across the country,” Wolf said on Twitter.
Grove’s Senate counterpart in the Republican-controlled Legislature, Sen. David Argall, R-Schuykill, said in an interview Thursday that legislation or a resolution in the chamber to commission some sort of audit remains a possibility in June.
Argall cited one bill as a possibility.
The bill, introduced in April by Sen. Bob Mensch, R-Montgomery, would commission the state’s independently elected auditor general — Republican Timothy DeFoor — to audit “statistically significant samples” from each county.
A subsequent report would have to cover a couple dozen subjects, tailored to Republican gripes over the 2020 election, including reviewing how counties determined the eligibility of voters and ballots, used drop boxes to collect ballots and handled mail-in ballots received after polls closed.
“There’s an enormous amount of election-related bills pending for the month of June, and this is one of them,” Argall said.
Mastriano, perhaps referencing Grove’s dismissal, said in a Facebook video that he might be satisfied with something less than a statewide audit.
“I’m a bit disconcerted that someone has come out on our side, not even leaving open the idea of an audit,” Mastriano said. “I don’t know how we can get around it, but the people overwhelmingly want an audit. I think just a county or two would do. My preference would be a Democrat and a Republican county and let the chips fall where they may.”
