With the threat of another GOP “Stop the Steal” movement in Pennsylvania looking increasingly real, the campaign arm for House Democrats is telling candidates to lawyer up.
Former President Donald Trump has reportedly been telling Republican allies, according to Rolling Stone, to prepare “scorched-earth legal tactics” to challenge election results—particularly in Philadelphia.
In response to those threats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent an email to Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania this week urging them to “identify a local attorney for your campaign.” That lawyer, the DCCC email said, should be available both on and after Election Day.
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The DCCC is also asking candidates to provide the campaign committee with the name of their lawyer, the name of their firm, and their contact information. The DCCC also warned candidates who are lawyers not to rely on their own legal prowess.
In other words, the DCCC is taking the threat of legal challenges seriously.
"MAGA Republicans are trying to undermine confidence in our elections because they know when more people vote, they lose,” DCCC spokesperson James Singer said in a statement when asked about the email. “The DCCC is fighting to ensure Pennsylvanians know how easy, safe, and secure it is to vote and to ensure every eligible ballot gets counted."
While having a lawyer ready to go for recount proceedings is entirely normal for a campaign, the DCCC effort involves coordinating with them around revived efforts to block mail-in voting, particularly around potential GOP efforts to throw out absentee ballots that aren’t dated in handwriting on the outside of the envelope. State election officials argued in court on Tuesday that the handwritten date should not be mandatory.
After Trump ordered election officials to “stop the count” on election night in 2020, the former president’s campaign lawyers failed to find any evidence of voter fraud in Pennsylvania and came up short in trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes, resulting in a scathing ruling from a federal judge who dismissed their lawsuit.
A GOP strategist with knowledge of preparations in the Keystone State said the Republicans aren’t doing enough compared to Democrats to have lawyers on the ground, despite the series of Trump meetings.
“Save America [Trump’s PAC] and none of these other places are trained to set up election workers. They just aren’t,” the strategist told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive internal conversations.
“It’s unfortunate nothing is going on, but he doesn’t have the organization.”
Other high-profile conservative figures have been drawing attention to Pennsylvania, trying to arouse suspicion around how long it takes to count the votes.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked why only “blue cities” take so long to count their votes in a quote tweet of a New York Post story on Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman saying it would likely take days for votes to be counted in the Keystone State because state law prevents mail-in votes from being counted early.
Pennsylvania Republicans blocked a law that would have allowed mail-in votes to be counted early, and outgoing Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed their bill to restrict absentee voting last year.
Tucker Carlson also brought up Pennsylvania on his primetime Fox News show Wednesday night.
America’s most-viewed cable news host gestured with air quotes about how the Democrats “can run mentally defective candidates and not only expect them to ‘win,’ but expect you to accept the outcome no matter how transparently absurd it is.”
Carlson went on to make an equally ominous and ludicrous prediction.
“On November 9th, they’ll be telling you that John Fetterman got 81 million votes in Pennsylvania, and they’ll threaten to put you in jail if you don’t believe that,” Carlson said. “Why wouldn’t they? It worked for Joe Biden.”
Although there are only 8.7 million people registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Carlson was alluding to President Biden’s overall vote total from his 2020 victory over Trump.
The Keystone State will be of utmost importance on the Electoral College map in 2024, and should GOP nominee Doug Mastriano prevail in the governor’s race—given the Pennsylvania governor’s ability to appoint the secretary of the commonwealth overseeing elections—Republicans could submit their own slate of electors backing Trump regardless of how the public votes. Without a mechanism to counter such collusion under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, this hypothetical scenario could imperil the certification of the next presidential election.
For Pennsylvania to pass a constitutional amendment changing its voting laws, the state legislature would need to pass it in two consecutive sessions. Trump has also urged GOP state lawmakers to repeal Act 77, which protects mail-in voting.
