Dush: Commonwealth Court Filing Reaffirms
Legislature’s Authority to Conduct Election Investigation
Posted on Oct 22, 2021
HARRISBURG – Fighting back against
the false narratives and cheap scare tactics of Attorney General Josh Shapiro
and Senate Democrats, Senator Cris Dush (R-Jefferson) and Senate Republicans
responded in court today with a filing that reaffirms the General Assembly’s
role to provide oversight and transparency of Pennsylvania’s elections.
One of the lynchpins of the lawsuit
filed by the Attorney General and Senate Democrats is their spurious claim that
the investigation jeopardizes the personal information of voters.
However, today’s legal filing notes
that the 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.
“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 and other defendants in the
case also point out election data has been shared voluntarily with other
parties, including private vendors maintaining the SURE system, the Electronic Registration Information Center, the Auditor General and every
county in the Commonwealth.
In 2019, the Auditor General – 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.”
The filing highlights other flaws in
the Democrats’ case, including the fact that having access to voter information
is not a violation of the Constitution. The subpoena would only transfer
information from one government entity to another, rendering the Constitutional
concerns invalid.
In addition, 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.
CONTACT: Jason Thompson