As the U.S. continues to deal with the fallout of ex-President Donald Trump’s brazen and destabilizing lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow rigged on behalf of Joe Biden, a prominent Pennsylvania Republican — state Representative Seth Grove — has admitted that Republicans perpetrated fraud during the 2020 election cycle. Previously, Grove boosted Trump’s position. Although Grove wasn’t actually in a place to carry out his wishes because he’s not a member of Congress, Grove at one point even backed Republican opposition to the Congressional certification of Biden’s presidential election victory.
After a reporter with the Pennsylvania Capital-Star asked Grove whether there was election fraud in 2020, the state Rep replied affirmatively. The reporter then asked who perpetrated that fraud, and Grove added as follows:
‘Right, Republicans. But it’s still election fraud. It doesn’t matter who [commits] it. We don’t want that fraud to occur. And to say there wasn’t any is a lie. Now, I will say there’s not like this mass amount of fraud, that’s going to shift hundreds of thousands of votes. But there was election fraud. We have had repeated, repeated election fraud in this commonwealth for decades.’
In reality, as Grove accurately pointed out, widespread fraud was not present in the 2020 presidential election as Republicans including Trump have claimed. (Grove’s claim of “repeated, repeated election fraud” in Pennsylvania across “decades” is dubious — again, the instances are isolated, generally speaking.) In Pennsylvania, a few Republicans have been charged over election fraud related to the 2020 cycle — although it would be ridiculous to pretend like these few isolated fraud cases are in any way a justification for the claims that essentially the entire 2020 presidential election process was suspicious.
A Pennsylvania man named Bruce Bartman filled out and submitted an absentee ballot in the name of his late mother, and late last year, another Pennsylvania man filled out an absentee ballot application in the name of his own late mother. Both men are Republicans, and the fraudulent ballot that Bartman submitted was in favor of Trump. Meanwhile, last November, another Republican man in Pennsylvania voted in-person at a polling place and then returned to that same polling place, this time with sunglasses on, and attempted to cast another ballot in the name of his son. In the end, Biden won Pennsylvania, where over 6.8 million ballots were cast, by over 80,000 votes.
