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HARRISBURG, PA (AP) — Governor Tom Wolf’s administration and a voting system maker are trying to prevent Republican lawmakers from expanding the “judicial investigation” of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania to a new front: auditing the voting machines.
Another step taken by the former President Donald Trumpbaseless allegations of election fraud.
Lawyers for Wolf’s top election official, Veronica DeGraffenreid, asked the court Friday afternoon to stop the digital data exchange scheduled for next Wednesday in southern Pennsylvania’s sparsely populated Fulton County.
Certification of electoral equipment used in last year’s presidential election in the heavily Republican county has already been revoked by the state, after Fulton County allowed a software company to inspect the equipment. West Chester-based software company Wake TSI was not federally accredited to inspect voting machines and later played a role in the partisan “supervision” of Republicans in Arizona, which was widely discredited.
DeGraffenreid’s attorneys wrote in a court filing that allowing a similarly unaccredited and inexperienced contractor hired by Pennsylvania’s Senate Republicans to extract digital data from equipment would quash the evidence in Fulton County’s case that challenged the state’s documentation.
On December 10, the head of the investigative committee, Sen. Cris Dush, R-Jefferson sent a letter by Fulton County requesting “digital data” from election computers and hardware used in the 2020 election.
Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems warned Fulton County that Senate Republicans violated their contract to grant their contractors access to their equipment to retrieve digital data.
But voting equipment at the center of some of the most heated conspiracy theories about last year’s presidential election, Dominion said, has a backup copy of the data that Fulton County could simply provide without granting access to Dominion’s equipment.
But Tom King, a lawyer representing Fulton County, said in an interview Saturday that digital election data simply isn’t what Dush wanted.
Instead, Dush is asking Senate Republicans’ contractor Ambassador Sage to conduct a “forensic investigation” to determine whether the Dominion’s equipment used there is identical to equipment approved by the state of Pennsylvania for use in last year’s election, King said.
“I think people just want to know if what’s being used in Fulton County is actually equipment that Dominion has been approved to supply in Pennsylvania,” King said. It is not clear to us at this point whether it is.”
King said that a county commissioner who spoke to Dush told him that the main subject of the investigation was about Dominion equipment. King said his review of the Wake TSI didn’t cover that.
Voting systems that have passed tamper-proof tests are state-approved. The US Election Assistance Commission accredits laboratories to test voting machines and provides guidance to states on how to maintain a chain of custody over voting systems.
King said he was allowed to fulfill the request under the contract, and he saw Ambassador Bilge as “highly qualified” to do the job. Separately, King said the practice would not affect court action or the state’s rights in court.
Court arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.
embers and her The Allies exerted continued pressure on the battlefield provinces. he He lost to Democrat Joe Biden—including in Pennsylvania—for searching ballot papers, voting machines, and voter lists for evidence to support his allies’ unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud.
Dush – advocating overthrowing Biden’s victory embers in Pennsylvania – didn’t say why he does it ask for access or not he looking for similar access in other counties.
he No message about it.
Dush insisted that the venture had nothing to do with it. embers or about solving problems in state elections rather than trying to disrupt last year’s presidential election.
In any case, analyzing voting machine data wasn’t specifically mentioned in the Senate Republicans’ $270,000 contract with Envoy Bilge, raising the question of whether Trump-aligned groups, like the Arizona initiative, were part of the bill.
Dush said he wants to bring Arizona-style electoral “supervision” to Pennsylvania.
Unlike Arizona, a subpoena approved by Dush’s Republican-controlled state Senate committee to Pennsylvania election officials stopped demanding ballots and voting machines, and other counties refused less formal requests.
But in Fulton County, Dush found a willing partner.
There, embers It won more than 85% of the vote last year, outpacing Democrats by 7 to 2 in registered Republican voters, according to official data.
Two Fulton County Republican commissioners posted via public registration requests in post-election internal emails and later expressed their solidarity with Republican senators who were trying to prevent Pennsylvania’s electoral votes from being used for Biden. “We cannot allow this election to be stolen,” one wrote.
No prosecutor, judge, or electoral commission in Pennsylvania was concerned about rampant fraud in the 2020 election, and courts at all levels have dismissed allegations of fraud, irregularities, and violations.
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