Pennsylvania
Ballot Security
What Politicians Say
The Republican gubernatorial nominee, Doug Mastriano, was a key player in efforts to overturn Biden’s win in Pennsylvania and has vowed to use the broad powers he would have as governor to influence future elections.
Mastriano has already pledged to throw out all voting machines and voter registrations in the state on his first day in office, although both moves would likely be challenged in court.
He’s also likely to encourage passage of and sign legislation similar to the massive Republican elections overhaul that would have tightened deadlines and expanded voter ID requirements. The state’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, vetoed that bill in 2021.
As governor, Mastriano would also name the state’s top elections official and play a key role in the certification of presidential electors.
He is running against Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who resisted efforts to overturn Biden’s win and has made election integrity a centerpiece of his campaign.
Ease of Voting
A bipartisan 2019 law allowed no-excuse vote-by-mail for the first time in Pennsylvania. It proved popular, with 2.6 million voters casting their ballot by mail in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, with nearly two-thirds of those ballots coming from registered Democrats.
After the election, US Representative Mike Kelly, a Trump supporter, sued to have all of Pennsylvania’s mail ballots thrown out or have the state’s electors chosen by its legislature, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. Both the state’s highest court and the Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit.
US Senator Ron Johnson said that a slate of fake electors he was supposed to deliver to Vice President Mike Pence originated with Kelly’s office, a claim that Kelly denied.
Fourteen Republican state lawmakers, including 11 who voted for the 2019 bill, sued again over the mail-in voting law in 2021, winning in a lower court. The case is now on appeal to the state Supreme Court.
At issue is Article VII, Section 14, of the state constitution, which requires the legislature to allow an alternative form of voting for people who will be absent on Election Day. Republicans contend that language actually limits vote-by-mail to only people with an excuse, making no-excuse absentee voting unconstitutional.
Ballot Security
Under pre-2020 Pennsylvania law, elections officials may not begin processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That led to delays in getting results after the 2020 election and most recently the 2022 midterm primaries in May.
The elections overhaul vetoed in 2021 would have allowed mail-in ballots to be processed and counted earlier, a reform supported by elections experts and local officials to speed counting on election night.
State law also requires mail ballots be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day. In 2020, the state Supreme Court extended that deadline three days due to mail delays caused by the pandemic, as long as ballots were mailed by Election Day.
Pennsylvania Republicans appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett not yet seated, allowing the extension to stand.
How Politicians Responded to the 2020 Election
Among the election deniers running for higher office, few were as heavily involved as Mastriano, who is a state senator.
After the 2020 election, Mastriano had a legislative hearing in Gettysburg after the 2020 election that featured Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, lobbied Justice Department officials to investigate false claims of fraud, attended the Jan. 6 rally in D.C., and briefly led a partisan effort to audit the election results in 2021.
He has also endorsed a fringe legal theory that the state’s Republican-controlled legislature could choose to overturn an election and appoint its own slate of presidential electors, and he has been subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks over a plan to submit false Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the winner.
Mastriano also used his own campaign funds to hire buses to take supporters to Washington, D.C. for Trump’s rally on the National Mall.
If elected, Mastriano would appoint the Secretary of State, the top elections official in Pennsylvania. He has pledged to appoint an unnamed “election integrity” expert who’s a “rock star” on the issue, decertify all of the state’s voting machines by executive order and throw out all 8.7 million existing voter registrations and force everyone to re-register, a move that would be difficult under federal law.
In addition, eight of the commonwealth’s nine Republican US representatives voted to reject Biden electors from their own state, four voted to reject Biden electors from Arizona, and seven signed an amicus brief seeking to have the Supreme Court intervene.
One of them, Representative Mike Kelly, also filed his own state and federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the election. Another, Representative Scott Perry, introduced Trump to a top Justice Department official who was sympathetic to his false election claims.
A 2021 report from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee singled out Perry and Mastriano as key Trump allies in the effort to overturn the election.
During a primetime hearing of the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attacks, Republican Representative Liz Cheney said that Perry also contacted the White House to seek a presidential pardon in the weeks after.