Joe Biden’s presidential victory in Pennsylvania had been certified for weeks when officials in some Republican-leaning counties began receiving strange phone calls from GOP state senators in late December.
The lawmakers, who had been publicly questioning Biden’s win, had a request: Would the counties agree to a voluntary audit of their ballots?
The push to conduct unofficial election audits in multiple counties, described in interviews and emails obtained by The Washington Post, served as a last-ditch effort by allies of former president Donald Trump to undercut Biden’s win after failing in the courts and the state legislature.
The previously unreported lobbying foreshadowed a playbook now in use in Arizona and increasingly being sought in other communities across the country as Trump supporters clamor for reviews of the ballots cast last fall, citing false claims that the vote was corrupted by fraud. The former president’s backers argue that any evidence of problems they can uncover will prove the election system is vulnerable — and could have been manipulated to help Biden win.
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The audits are being pushed by a loose affiliation of GOP lawmakers, lawyers and self-described election experts, backed by private fundraising campaigns whose donors are unknown.
In Pennsylvania, the state senators quietly targeted at least three small counties, all of which Trump had won handily. Their proposal was unorthodox: to have a private company scrutinize the county’s ballots, for free — a move outside the official processes used for election challenges.
Only one county is known to have agreed to the senators’ request: rural Fulton County, on the Maryland border, where Trump performed better than anywhere else in the state, winning nearly 86 percent of the roughly 8,000 votes cast.
“I think they thought this was just a small, friendly area. If they could get away with it, they could raise questions about the legitimacy of the election,” said Dayton Tweedy, 60, a teacher in Fulton who, with his wife, Kimbra, spent months trying to learn more about how the audit was conducted in his community — and why.
Fulton County residents Kimbra and Dayton Tweedy have pressed local officials about why they allowed a private company to audit ballots cast last fall. “I don’t want to look back 20 years from now and regret not having spoken out,” Kimbra said. “We want to keep our democracy for the next generation.” (Rosem Morton for The Washington Post)
On Dec. 31, in the quiet of the winter holiday, county officials allowed a West Chester, Pa., company called Wake TSI to spend an afternoon recounting about 1,000 mail-in ballots and taking data from county voting machines.
According to a county document obtained by The Post, Wake TSI was “contracted” to a nonprofit group run by Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who was in the midst of filing a flurry of lawsuits around the country challenging the election results.
Wake TSI submitted a draft report in February to Fulton officials declaring the election had been “well run” and “conducted in a diligent and effective manner,” county documents show.
However, before the final version was posted to the county website, it was revised. The new version included a caveat to the county’s otherwise clean bill of health: “This does not indicate that there were no issues with the election, just that they were not the fault of the County Election Commission or County Election Director,” it read, before flagging potential problems with the county voting machines and other aspects of the election.
The report has been circulated on social media by Trump allies who have sought to claim that voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and fraud.
County officials did not respond to requests for comment on who made the changes to the report. Wake TSI and Powell did not respond to requests for comment.
The early attempt to launch off-the-books audits in Pennsylvania counties shows the relentlessness of the campaign by Trump’s allies to overturn the election — an assault that began before the polls closed and has only expanded in the months since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, trying to prevent Biden’s win from being formalized.
The full scope of the endeavor to undermine the 2020 results is still coming into public view. On Friday, newly released emails revealed that Trump called the Republican president of the Arizona Senate late last year to thank her for trying to prove fraud in her state. Around the same time frame, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was pressuring the Justice Department to investigate unfounded claims about vulnerabilities in the election, the New York Times first reported Saturday.
At a conference in Texas last weekend, Powell said she still believes Trump should be “reinstated” as president, an idea that has also transfixed the former president.
One of the Pennsylvania state senators who pushed for the county audits, Republican Doug Mastriano, told Trump at a one-on-one meeting in New York last month that he could engineer an audit in his state, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. Mastriano did not respond to requests for comment.
Wake TSI has played a key role in the audit of the Maricopa County, Ariz., ballots — hired as a subcontractor to handle the hand recount portion of the process.
Last week, Mastriano and other Pennsylvania lawmakers toured the site in Phoenix where the recount is underway. He told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he believed a similar audit should be initiated in Pennsylvania.
“For the sake . . . of our constitutional republic, and for the sake of people’s peace of mind, let’s just do it,” he said. “Let’s pick a few counties and put people’s minds at rest.”
On Friday, Trump issued a statement praising Mastriano for leading the trip to Arizona and calling on the Pennsylvania Senate to heed his call.
The former president added: “The people of Pennsylvania and America deserve to know the truth.”
Early returns on election night showed Trump ahead in the state that had helped him win the White House in 2016. But a Pennsylvania law that Republicans resisted changing barred counties from opening more than 2.5 million mail-in ballots until Election Day. As a result, it took days to tally all the votes, particularly in Democratic strongholds of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where many Biden supporters had voted by mail to avoid visiting polls during the coronavirus pandemic.
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...456952-bfe0-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html
The lawmakers, who had been publicly questioning Biden’s win, had a request: Would the counties agree to a voluntary audit of their ballots?
The push to conduct unofficial election audits in multiple counties, described in interviews and emails obtained by The Washington Post, served as a last-ditch effort by allies of former president Donald Trump to undercut Biden’s win after failing in the courts and the state legislature.
The previously unreported lobbying foreshadowed a playbook now in use in Arizona and increasingly being sought in other communities across the country as Trump supporters clamor for reviews of the ballots cast last fall, citing false claims that the vote was corrupted by fraud. The former president’s backers argue that any evidence of problems they can uncover will prove the election system is vulnerable — and could have been manipulated to help Biden win.
ADVERTISING
The audits are being pushed by a loose affiliation of GOP lawmakers, lawyers and self-described election experts, backed by private fundraising campaigns whose donors are unknown.
In Pennsylvania, the state senators quietly targeted at least three small counties, all of which Trump had won handily. Their proposal was unorthodox: to have a private company scrutinize the county’s ballots, for free — a move outside the official processes used for election challenges.
Only one county is known to have agreed to the senators’ request: rural Fulton County, on the Maryland border, where Trump performed better than anywhere else in the state, winning nearly 86 percent of the roughly 8,000 votes cast.
“I think they thought this was just a small, friendly area. If they could get away with it, they could raise questions about the legitimacy of the election,” said Dayton Tweedy, 60, a teacher in Fulton who, with his wife, Kimbra, spent months trying to learn more about how the audit was conducted in his community — and why.
Fulton County residents Kimbra and Dayton Tweedy have pressed local officials about why they allowed a private company to audit ballots cast last fall. “I don’t want to look back 20 years from now and regret not having spoken out,” Kimbra said. “We want to keep our democracy for the next generation.” (Rosem Morton for The Washington Post)
On Dec. 31, in the quiet of the winter holiday, county officials allowed a West Chester, Pa., company called Wake TSI to spend an afternoon recounting about 1,000 mail-in ballots and taking data from county voting machines.
According to a county document obtained by The Post, Wake TSI was “contracted” to a nonprofit group run by Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who was in the midst of filing a flurry of lawsuits around the country challenging the election results.
Wake TSI submitted a draft report in February to Fulton officials declaring the election had been “well run” and “conducted in a diligent and effective manner,” county documents show.
However, before the final version was posted to the county website, it was revised. The new version included a caveat to the county’s otherwise clean bill of health: “This does not indicate that there were no issues with the election, just that they were not the fault of the County Election Commission or County Election Director,” it read, before flagging potential problems with the county voting machines and other aspects of the election.
The report has been circulated on social media by Trump allies who have sought to claim that voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and fraud.
County officials did not respond to requests for comment on who made the changes to the report. Wake TSI and Powell did not respond to requests for comment.
The early attempt to launch off-the-books audits in Pennsylvania counties shows the relentlessness of the campaign by Trump’s allies to overturn the election — an assault that began before the polls closed and has only expanded in the months since a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, trying to prevent Biden’s win from being formalized.
The full scope of the endeavor to undermine the 2020 results is still coming into public view. On Friday, newly released emails revealed that Trump called the Republican president of the Arizona Senate late last year to thank her for trying to prove fraud in her state. Around the same time frame, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was pressuring the Justice Department to investigate unfounded claims about vulnerabilities in the election, the New York Times first reported Saturday.
At a conference in Texas last weekend, Powell said she still believes Trump should be “reinstated” as president, an idea that has also transfixed the former president.
One of the Pennsylvania state senators who pushed for the county audits, Republican Doug Mastriano, told Trump at a one-on-one meeting in New York last month that he could engineer an audit in his state, according to a person familiar with the meeting, who spoke the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. Mastriano did not respond to requests for comment.
Wake TSI has played a key role in the audit of the Maricopa County, Ariz., ballots — hired as a subcontractor to handle the hand recount portion of the process.
Last week, Mastriano and other Pennsylvania lawmakers toured the site in Phoenix where the recount is underway. He told a Wall Street Journal reporter that he believed a similar audit should be initiated in Pennsylvania.
“For the sake . . . of our constitutional republic, and for the sake of people’s peace of mind, let’s just do it,” he said. “Let’s pick a few counties and put people’s minds at rest.”
On Friday, Trump issued a statement praising Mastriano for leading the trip to Arizona and calling on the Pennsylvania Senate to heed his call.
The former president added: “The people of Pennsylvania and America deserve to know the truth.”
A key state swings for Biden
The senators’ request to audit county results in Pennsylvania came at the end of nearly two months of tumult in the Keystone State that followed the Nov. 3 election.Early returns on election night showed Trump ahead in the state that had helped him win the White House in 2016. But a Pennsylvania law that Republicans resisted changing barred counties from opening more than 2.5 million mail-in ballots until Election Day. As a result, it took days to tally all the votes, particularly in Democratic strongholds of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where many Biden supporters had voted by mail to avoid visiting polls during the coronavirus pandemic.
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...456952-bfe0-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html
