Pennsylvania state Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) has sued a group of Republican state Senators who recently voted to authorize a subpoena for troves of personally identifying information for all registered voters in the state of Pennsylvania. The information that they’re after ranges from names to driver’s license numbers and portions of Social Security numbers, while the new lawsuit from Shapiro insists that the subpoena violates Pennsylvania’s state Constitution and seeks to stop the subpoena’s enforcement.
🚨NEW: Pennsylvania AG @JoshShapiroPA has sued the Republican state senators who have subpoenaed voter records from the 2020 presidential election. https://t.co/wwJeZX0hhY
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 24, 2021
As explained by the voting rights organization called Democracy Docket, the case specifically insists that the subpoena “interferes with the right to vote and “free and equal” elections, infringes on Pennsylvanians’ right to privacy regarding their personal information, was issued without a legitimate legislative purpose, was done outside the purview of the state Senate committee’s authority and is overbroad.” This case is not actually the first legal challenge targeting the subpoena and broader, GOP-led investigation of last year’s presidential election results in which it emerged. Every Democrat in the Pennsylvania state Senate banded together recently behind a similar lawsuit seeking to put a stop to the madness.
As Pennsylvania Democratic legislators put it in a statement at the time:
‘The latest ploy by the Senate Republicans is unprecedented and completely unwarranted… All aspects of the certified 2020 election have been thoroughly reviewed and adjudicated in the courts with no findings of irregularities or fraud. The timeframe to contest the 2020 certified election results is long overdue.’
The Associated Press explains that the lawsuit from Democratic state Senators in Pennsylvania “contends that the Senate Republican bid to investigate the election illegally treads on the court’s duties, violates state law over election audits and seeks information that is barred from public disclosure.” The challenged subpoena was issued by the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, whose efforts to examine last year’s presidential election in the state despite the absence of meaningful evidence of systematic fraud mirror efforts undertaken by Republican state Senators in Arizona. A preliminary report from that Arizona audit emerged this week, revealing that even the incompetent auditors on the case concluded, as had already been shown, that Biden won Maricopa County. Trump and certain allies of his had widely touted the Arizona audit, so the results seemed certain to not go over well in his circles.
