FILE - A canvas observer photographs Lehigh County provisional ballots as vote counting in the general election continues, Nov. 6, 2020, in Allentown, Pa. A review by The Associated Press in the six battleground states disputed by former President Trump has found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud, a minuscule number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)
The Associated Press (AP) is a U.S.-based not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City.
AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file
FILE - A canvas observer photographs Lehigh County provisional ballots as vote counting in the general election continues, Nov. 6, 2020, in Allentown, Pa. A review by The Associated Press in the six battleground states disputed by former President Trump has found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud, a minuscule number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)
(Harrisburg) — Republican lawmakers aiming to expand what they call a “forensic investigation” of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election into a new frontier of inspecting voting machines must wait until next month, a judge decided Tuesday.
After a telephone conference, Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt sided with a lawyer for Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration and said that Fulton County must first work out an agreed-upon set of rules for an inspection.
Leavitt gave them until Jan. 10, at the suggestion of a lawyer representing Wolf’s top election official in a separate lawsuit involving Fulton County’s voting machines.
In that lawsuit, Fulton County is contesting the state’s decertification of voting machines it used in last year’s presidential election.
State lawyers last week discovered that Fulton County commissioners had voted to allow a contractor hired by Senate Republicans to download data and software on the voting systems. The exchange had been scheduled for Wednesday.
Wolf’s administration objected in court, saying such access by an inexperienced person who is not federally accredited to inspect voting systems posed a risk of damaging or altering their software or data.
A lawyer representing Fulton County, Tom King, has said that the Republican senator in charge of the “forensic investigation” wants to determine if the county’s voting system — provided by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems — was the same equipment as was certified by the state of Pennsylvania for use in last year’s election.
Fulton County’s two Republican commissioners have expressed solidarity with Republican senators who later sought to block Pennsylvania’s electoral votes from being cast for Biden.
The Associated Press and WITF’s democracy reporter Jordan Wilkie are partnering to tell stories about how Pennsylvania elections work, and to debunk misinformation surrounding elections.
