Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/House/Counting Electoral Votes/Pennsylvania Objection Debate/Doyle Speech
Mr. Michael F. Doyle of Pennsylvania. Madam Speaker, nearly 7 million Pennsylvanians showed up to vote in the 2020 elections. They cast their votes for Democrats and Republicans up and down the ballot, including the entire U.S. House delegation, the entire State house, half of the State senate, and other State and local races.
Since the election, there have been allegations of widespread election fraud in Pennsylvania; but, remarkably, the 20 suits filed by the Trump campaign, Pennsylvania Republicans, and others challenging the results in Pennsylvania have never claimed that there was voter fraud. □ 0040
Perhaps that is because attorneys could lose their licenses when they make unsubstantiated claims in court. That is where the rubber really meets the road.
So if these lawsuits didn’t claim election fraud, what did they claim?
Most of the legal challenges to the Presidential election in Pennsylvania question relatively small numbers of ballots that were allegedly tainted by technical violations. Even assuming that all of these ballots had been cast for Joe Biden, throwing them out wouldn’t have changed the result of the election.
Now, one exception is the lawsuit filed by one of our colleagues from Pennsylvania, Kelly v. Commonwealth, which would have thrown out all the mail-in votes cast in the 2020 general election on the grounds that Act 77, the State law allowing those votes, was unconstitutional. That suit would have disenfranchised 2½ million Pennsylvanians. Let’s let that sink in, 2½ million Pennsylvanians would have had their votes nullified.
Now, I want to provide my colleagues with some background about the State law at the heart of this challenge. In 2019, the Republican-controlled State legislature approved Act 77, a bipartisan bill to reform the State’s election laws, which instituted no-excuse mail balloting. Act 77 was supported almost unanimously by Republicans in the State House and State Senate. In fact, it was unanimous in the State Senate and all but two Republicans in the State House.
Moreover, once this Act was passed, Act 77 had a 120-day period where challenges could be filed against the Act if people thought it was unconstitutional. Well, 4 months went by, nobody files a challenge. On June 3, Pennsylvania had their primary under this new system. Nobody challenged the primary election. It was only challenged in November, when Republicans didn’t get the result they wanted at the top of the ticket. Not surprisingly, this case was dismissed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
Another exception is Texas v. Pennsylvania. They asked the court to reject the results of the Pennsylvania Presidential contest in Pennsylvania and several other States, disenfranchising tens of millions of the voters. Seven Republican members of the Pennsylvania U.S. House delegation signed the U.S. House Republican brief in support of Texas v. Pennsylvania.
While I feel compelled to point out to my colleagues that the same voters who sent them to the 117th Congress cast their votes for the President by marking the very same ballots, which were read by the very same ballot scanners and monitored by the very same election workers. Yet our colleagues who signed the brief only want to invalidate the Presidential votes. This is illogical and inconsistent, colleagues, and I am pleased to note that the Supreme Court rejected it as well.
The fact is, the election has received unprecedented scrutiny in the courts. I believe it is irresponsible and undemocratic to argue today that the U.S. Congress ought to relitigate the 2020 Presidential election and second-guess the will of the voters in multiple States, the decisions of numerous State and Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, and the counts and recounts conducted by State election officials.
There were 20 lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania challenging aspects of the Presidential election. In 19 of them you got laughed out of court. The one case you won affected roughly 100 votes. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won by over 80,000.