State Sen. Cris Dush and Senate Republicans filed a court brief Friday that they say affirms the General Assembly’s role to provide oversight and transparency of Pennsylvania’s elections.
Dush, R-Brookville, said in a press release Friday that one of the “lynchpins (sic) of the lawsuit filed by (Attorney General Josh Shapiro) and Senate Democrats is their spurious claim that the investigation jeopardizes the personal information of voters.”
Friday’s filing in Commonwealth Court notes that Pennsylvania’s Department of State provided the same information to the League of Women Voters in 2012 as part of the group’s lawsuit to overturn the state’s voter ID law, Dush said.
“If they gave that information to a private third-party group then, how can they possibly argue against transferring that data to another co-equal branch of government now?” Dush said.
Dush leads the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, which is handling a probe of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. On Sept. 15, the panel issued a subpoena seeking the personal identifying information — including names, birth dates, addresses and partial Social Security numbers — for as many as nine million registered voters.
Democrats challenged the subpoena in what they called a constitutional overreach that jeopardizes the safety of voters’ personal information. Shapiro, the presumptive Democrat nominee to run to succeed Gov. Tom Wolf in 2022, later joined in the challenge.
Dush and other Republicans point out in addition that election data has been shared voluntarily with other parties, including private vendors maintaining the SURE system, the Electronic Registration Information Center, the state’s auditor general and every county in the state.
Dush said that in 2019 former Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, a Democrat, “was able to identify thousands of instances” where single voters had multiple entries in the SURE system, which he concluded “could potentially allow a voter to vote more than once in an election.”
Dush said Friday’s filing highlights other flaws in the Democrats’ case, including that having access to voter information is not a violation of the Constitution. The subpoena seeking the information would only transfer data from one government entity to another, rendering the constitutional concerns invalid.
In addition, he said the filing outlines the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee’s statutory authority to review the information requested in the subpoena. It also raises the point that Rules of Parliamentary Practice state the General Assembly has the power to govern its own deliberations.
While Dush has maintained that the GOP’s election probe is about ensuring the integrity of balloting in Pennsylvania, Democrats argue the effort remains an attempt to cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win over then-incumbent President Donald Trump.
Biden won the battleground state of Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes, but Trump and his supporters complained that changes to election rules and procedures in the weeks and even days leading up to the election opened the door to potential fraud.
Courts have ruled that not enough evidence was presented to show significant fraud occurred in Pennsylvania and other states where Republicans questioned results that favored Biden.
