After removing Sen. Doug Mastriano from his role as lead on looking into an audit of 2020 General Election results, Sen. Jake Corman is still committed to looking into the possibility of an audit. | Adobe Stock
After removing Sen. Doug Mastriano from his role as lead on looking into an audit of 2020 General Election results, Sen. Jake Corman is still committed to looking into the possibility of an audit. | Adobe Stock
Pennsylvania Senate President Jake Corman (R-Bellefonte) cites the controversial actions leading up to the November 2020 elections by former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the lack of transparency by current Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid, as the reasons behind his support for a full forensic investigation into the general election and the 2021 primaries.
Both secretaries were appointed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.
“The underhanded actions of our disgraced, now-former secretary of state cast doubt upon the fairness of the process, and our new acting secretary has done everything in her power to shield that process from transparency,” Corman wrote in an op-ed on his website. “This includes undercutting the Senate’s clear legal authority to provide oversight of our elections in threatening to decertify equipment reviewed by ‘third parties.’”
In July, Degraffenreid decertified the voting equipment of Fulton County, which agreed to participate in an audit request by Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Greene Township), who initially took the lead among Pennsylvania lawmakers in pushing for the audit.
Boockvar, who resigned in February for failing to properly advertise a proposed constitutional amendment, "fundamentally altered the manner in which Pennsylvania’s election is being conducted,” Pennsylvania Senate Republicans said in November.
Hearings about the elections, led by Sen. Cris Dush (R-Pine Creek Township), are scheduled to begin this week. Late last week, Corman asked Dush to lead the investigation after slamming Mastriano, for “politics and showmanship and not actually getting things done.”
“There were concerns that Sen. Mastriano was ignoring the advice of legal counsel and proceeding in a way that was not legally sound and would almost definitely been thrown out by the courts,” Corman spokesman Jason Thompson told Keystone Times.
On Monday Corman told radio personality Wendy Bell that the Senate wouldn’t hold back in trying to get voting record ballots and machines.
“We can bring people in,” he told Bell. “We can put them under oath. We can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do. That’s what we’re going to do.”
In early summer, Dush, Mastriano and House Judiciary Chairman Rob Kauffman (R-Franklin) toured the facilities where a forensic audit is taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes the Phoenix area.
The recount is viewed by Democrats and some Republicans as a bogus attempt to revise the 2020 election results in Arizona, which backed a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1996.
In the Nov. 3 statement calling for Boockvar’s resignation, Senate Republicans said that the “constantly changing guidance she has delivered to counties not only directly contradicts the Election Code language she is sworn to uphold, but also conflicts her own litigation statements and decisions of both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court.”
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