Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court is expected to soon issue a decision on whether the state Senate Republicans’ 2020 election probe may continue.
Specifically, the judges must determine whether delivery of information subpoenaed by the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee would breach voters’ privacy rights as state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) and other plaintiffs maintain.
Counsel for the attorney general’s office and Senate Democrats argued last month before a five-judge panel that lawmakers cannot demand voters’ records including state-issued ID numbers and partial Social Security numbers from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Subpoenas issued by the Senate committee pertain to records for all nine million registered voters in the Keystone State. Senate Republicans have hired the Iowa-based firm Envoy Sage, LLC to review those records and other information pertaining to recent Pennsylvania elections.
Organizations joining the challenge to the Senate subpoenas include the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA), the ACLU Voting Rights Project, Common Cause PA, the League of Women Voters of PA and Make The Road PA. Attorneys for the ACLU are representing eight private citizens objecting to the investigation.
“The state constitution includes a right to privacy that places boundaries on the government’s ability to seize our personal information,” ACLU-PA legal director Witold “Vic” Walczak wrote in an online statement yesterday. “To get it, the government better have a very good reason, and this committee does not. In court, the senators’ counsel hasn’t even tried to offer a reason. They simply claim that they’re the government so they should get it.”
Plaintiffs have asked judges to quash the subpoenas outright, though the court panel could also order an evidentiary hearing to elicit testimony from witnesses and experts and to permit the litigants to access documentary evidence from each other.
Counsel for Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee Chair Cris Dush (R-PA-Wellsboro) have contended that legislators have the needed leeway to requisition voters’ information from the Secretary of the Commonwealth and that official protocol will protect voters’ privacy.
“There is no reason to believe or suggest that any contract with a third party vendor to review this information as part of the Committee’s investigation would not contain the same types of protections against unlawful disclosure as would any contract entered into by the Department of State as it relates to this information,” attorney Matthew H. Haverstick argued in an answer to the petitioners.
Haverstick pointed out that, although the Department of State has balked at requests to hand over voter data to a private vendor, the department currently contracts with a private, South Dakota-based election-software company which has general access to that data.
Senate Republicans insist that their right to thoroughly investigate possible irregularities regarding recent Pennsylvania elections—which only since 2020 have featured no-excuse mail-in voting—is paramount as lawmakers consider election-integrity measures.
“…The Senate, through the Committee, is analyzing whether to make, alter, or repeal election laws,” Haverstick wrote. “It is doing so through a factual investigation. That investigation is being conducted in part by subpoena. And the subject matter of the investigation—elections—is not only arguably within the Senate’s power, but also constitutionally committed to the Senate’s (and House’s) purview in multiple sections” of the state Constitution.
Shapiro, Senate Democratic leaders and other petitioners in the lawsuit have—consistent with progressive voices nationally—spoken of the Senate probe as nothing less than an onslaught against democracy itself.
“We can all see what is happening here in Pennsylvania and around the country,” Walczak lamented. “Some elected officials and activists are not hiding their hostility to democracy, and the Senate committee’s highly suspicious election review is another move in their high-stakes chess game. Frankly, this dubious effort is a further attempt to undermine fair, free elections by people who only think electoral outcomes are legitimate when their preferred candidate wins. If they have their way and put their thumbs on the scales to the point of overturning the will of voters, it’s ‘checkmate’ for democracy.”
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Pennsylvania Judicial Court” by Pamela Stauffer.
