After President Biden was sworn in, election denialism continued to simmer in Pennsylvania, where the far-right faction of the GOP has kept the misinformation and conspiracy theories alive on social media and are ready to sow more mistrust and chaos in 2024.
- Immediately after the election was called for Biden, the Trump campaign and state Republicans filed multiple challenges to the outcome in Pennsylvania. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others argued that GOP election observers were kept too far away from the tabulation in Philadelphia, that some Democratic-leaning counties unfairly allowed people to fix technical problems with their mail-in ballots, and that mail-in ballots arriving after Tuesday, November 3 should not have been counted. By late November, a federal appeals court sided with lower court decisions in rejecting Trump’s challenges, finding the accusations made to be without merit.
- On November 21, 2020, a federal judge dismissed the Trump campaign’s request to block the certification of votes in Pennsylvania, a measure that would have effectively disenfranchised almost 7 million voters.
- On December 4, 2020, 64 Pennsylvania House Republicans signed a letter asking the state’s congressional delegation in Washington to object to certifying Biden’s Electoral College votes from Pennsylvania at the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
- Twenty Pennsylvania Republicans attempted to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election by submitting fake Electoral College documents to Congress as part of the January 6 certification process.
- Unlike in most other states involved in the fake electors scheme, the certificate signed by Pennsylvania’s fake electors included a caveat (as in Nevada) that said their votes should only be counted if a court recognized them as legitimate electors. In January 2022, the state attorney general’s office determined that although “their rhetoric and policy were intentionally misleading and purposefully damaging to our democracy,” the certificate the fake electors signed did not meet the legal standards for the state to charge them with forgery because of the caveat.
- In December 2020, the Trump campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn three Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings about the election that found his claims of fraud to be unfounded. In February 2021, SCOTUS also rejected Trump’s election challenges.
- Despite two previous audits conducted by the state of Pennsylvania, Republican state senators initiated their own “forensic investigation” of the 2020 presidential election results in November 2021. They awarded a no-bid contract to Envoy Sage, a small Iowa-based firm with no elections experience, to conduct the audit, which also included a review of voting machines used in Fulton County.
- The results of the Republican-led state Senate audit have not been made public and it is unclear if they ever will be, according to the contract signed with Envoy Sage. The contract required the company to deliver its findings by May 15, 2022, but the Senate could extend the agreement “if necessary,” which it did.
- In 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement and strong backing from the state GOP, Doug Mastriano, a far-right state senator who is among the most prominent election deniers in the country, lost his gubernatorial race against then attorney general and now Governor Josh Shapiro (D).
- Just before assuming office in 2023, Governor-elect Josh Shapiro (D) nominated Al Schmidt, a Republican who had received death threats after standing up to Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020, to be Pennsylvania’s top election official. The new governor explained his choice by saying that Schmidt, who had served for a decade as a city and elections commissioner in Philadelphia, was “an integral part of the effort to protect our democracy and stop Pennsylvanians’ votes from being thrown out” after the 2020 election.
- At least 85 Pennsylvanians have been charged in federal court for committing crimes as part of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. As of January 2024, 52 of them had been sentenced.