Trump’s 2020 denials are front & center in PA
By Ted Behr
Months before the November 2020 election, Donald Trump saw the handwriting on the wall. As polls indicated Joe Biden was drawing ahead with voters, particularly in battleground states like Pennsylvania, former President Trump began claiming that if Biden won it would be only because the election had been stolen.
After 61 court cases and numerous recounts, Trump and his sorry supporters still maintain that Joe Biden’s victory was false. This week Trump tweeted about the “… massive fraud and election interference at a level never seen before in our Country.” His remedy, “…declare the 2020 Election irreparably compromised and have a new Election immediately!”
As the Prophet Isaiah predicted, “They have hatched the eggs of deadly vipers and spin a spider’s web!” (Isaiah 59:5)
Mouthing the “fraud” assertion, of course, has become the test point for Republicans around the country. And nowhere has the “stop the steal” approach been more pronounced than with the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, State Senator Doug Mastriano.
Back in May 2022, Mastriano used Trump’s last-minute endorsement to “out radicalize” the other Republican hopefuls and win the Primary Election. The risk to Pennsylvanians and to the process of democratic government in general is that as Governor, Mastriano has promised to appoint the PA Secretary of State and refuse to certify the election results in the Presidential Election of 2024 if Democrats won in our state.
For instance, he has already indicated his intention to closely monitor the voting results in heavily Democrat districts (like Philadelphia) and decertify voting machines where he wishes. With Republican control in the legislature, Mastriano will certainly move to tighten voter ID requirements, require voters to re-register before the 2024 Presidential election, remove the convenient neighborhood ballot boxes, cut voting days and hours, and further the decline of public confidence in honest elections and in democracy itself – that Richard Nixon and Donald Trump initiated.
Overall, the anti-democratic risk is growing.
According to the Washington Post newspaper, “…in the six battleground states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 (primary election) contests have embraced the former president’s false claims.” As Governor, Mastriano would have the power to change election laws, investigate fraud charges, and otherwise shape voting outcomes.
(By his own admission, Mastriano admits attending the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
While he may have crossed police lines, he denies entering the Capital.)
Quoted in the Washington Post, Cliff Levine, a Democratic election lawyer based in Pittsburgh, stated that there are many other ways an election-denying governor could try to create election-related chaos by “decertifying machines, blocking electronic counting of ballots, or pushing new policies that … empower the legislature rather than voters to determine which presidential candidate’s electors are counted. The systemwide protections to ensure fair and free elections will be severely challenged” if Mastriano wins, Levine warned. “The dam will burst.”
(Information and quotes in this article were taken from the Washington Post article, “Doug Mastriano’s Pa. victory could give 2020 denier oversight of 2024, by Rosalind S. Helderman, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey, May 18, 2022.)
(Ted Behr is a US Army veteran, former Editor of the Globe Times, a retired businessman, and adjunct university instructor in the US and China.)
