PHILADELPHIA — Jake Corman has said for weeks that the rumor that Pennsylvania lawmakers would intervene in the presidential race by directly appointing presidential electors is not true.
Corman, the majority leader of GOP-run state Senate, wrote in an October op-ed with another legislator that the General Assembly “does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors.” On his Twitter account, his pinned tweet reads, “I have had ZERO contact with the Trump campaign or others about how PA chooses electors.”
But with President Donald Trump refusing to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden and top Republicans rallying around his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, pressure has begun mounting on Corman and other GOP state leaders to reverse course and somehow overturn the results of the race. With 98 percent of estimated votes reported, Biden leads in Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points — or 45,659 votes.
The pressure is coming from all corners of the party, including South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Graham, a top Trump ally, said “everything should be on the table” when asked if Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere should invalidate election results due to supposed “corruption.” DeSantis said state legislators should “exhaust every option to make sure we have a fair count.”
A small cadre of conservative Pennsylvania state legislators held a Harrisburg press conference Tuesday calling for an audit of the election to be completed before electors are seated.
“We have grave concerns regarding the future of our commonwealth,” said GOP state Rep. Dawn Keefer, who represents parts of York and Cumberland counties, both of which voted for Trump by double-digit percentage points. “We believe this moment is pivotal and important enough that the General Assembly needs to take extraordinary measures to answer these extraordinary questions.”
The state lawmakers on Tuesday offered no evidence of voter fraud. Only about 20 Republicans attended, a fraction of the nearly 140 members in the state legislature — and GOP legislative leaders were missing.
“It’s not going anywhere in the Senate,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Pennsylvania-based GOP consultant, of the direct appointment of electors by the legislature. “I think those 19 folks had an itch to scratch. They just scratched it. I think that’s kind of the end of it.”
Still, the fact that Trump and state lawmakers are stoking fears of extensive voter fraud without evidence all but guarantees that a significant number of voters here will question the integrity of the race. A Morning Consult/POLITICO survey found that only 23 percent of Republican voters said they trust the election results in Pennsylvania.
“There’s some simple, powerful, damaging narrative here. One of them seems to be that the only way you can lose is because the other side cheated,” said David Thornburgh, president of the Committee of Seventy, a Pennsylvania-based good-government group. “The more that that is repeated — and the fewer folks that stand up and say, ‘No, you play the game, the other person gets more votes, you lose, you concede, we get on with it,’ and this false narrative that if you just yell and scream, ‘Fraud, fraud, fraud!’ that somehow there’s some basis in truth in that — I think is just damaging.”
But, Thornburgh added, the state law is clear that “the certification of the election is between the governor and the secretary of the commonwealth, so there’s no room for the legislature there and I do think it’s significant that the leadership is not supportive of this effort.”
Keefer was asked at the press conference about the goal of an audit. She replied, “Once we see the findings, then we can determine what the course of action should be.” Keefer also referred questions about whether state GOP leaders support the proposal to them. Prior to Tuesday, both Corman and House Speaker Bryan Cutler spoke out in favor of an audit, but they were not present at the event.
State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, one of the most conservative members in the House, has gone as far as Graham and DeSantis in suggesting state lawmakers should take matters into their own hands.
“Our state legislature must be prepared to use all constitutional authority to right the wrong, including the power given in the U.S. Constitution Article 2 Section 1 that [sic] 'Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…,’” he said on Facebook.
The Biden campaign and several state Democrats have sought to project calm and dismiss Trump’s refusal to concede. On Tuesday, Biden called it an “embarrassment” and said “nothing is going to stop” the transfer of power.
Likewise, Brendan McPhillips, Biden’s Pennsylvania state director, said of the circumstances here, “I do think it’s just noise. The state Senate leadership has already said that they will not do anything to overturn the will of the people. Most legislators in the building were on the very same ballot, have already acknowledged the results of their own races, and are committed to recognizing President-elect Biden as the winner of Pennsylvania's electors."
As long as Trump presses forward, Pennsylvania Republicans are unlikely to turn down the volume anytime soon, however. On Tuesday, the president hinted that he was monitoring their activity by appearing to weigh in on state legislative leadership elections, tweeting, “Pennsylvania Party Leadership votes are this week. I hope they pick very tough and smart fighters. We will WIN!!”
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democrat, said the news media should stop giving oxygen to Trump and his allies when it comes to claims of voter fraud.
“It’s bullshit. It’s nothing. There’s no voter fraud, there’s no anything,” he said. “At what point does yelling ‘voter fraud’ when there’s zero evidence become yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater? It’s not protected speech anymore. And the media needs to turn its back, and let him tweet all day if he wants. Because even Twitter censors it and says this is garbage.”
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