Since November 3rd, Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative from Philadelphia, has received a stream of threatening text messages and e-mails from voters. “You must not certify the fraudulent results of this election until all LEGAL ballots are counted,” Steven P. wrote to Kenyatta. “If you do, I will work tirelessly to make sure you are not reelected.” Kenyatta has also received death threats; the most disturbing, sent from an e-mail account registered in his own name, was laden with expletives and included the words, “How much death? So much death!” Kenyatta, who is thirty, with a baby face, believes that the threats are a by-product of a near-constant campaign waged by Donald Trump and his Republican colleagues to undermine the results of a free and fair election. “There is a contingent of Republicans who are afraid of Trump,” he told me. “Others really believe him.”
In recent weeks, Trump has claimed baselessly that he lost the Presidential election because of widespread voter fraud, and has launched lawsuits in key states to try to get ballots invalidated. He has also pressured Republican state legislatures to intervene on his behalf. In Pennsylvania, this legislative threat has taken different forms, but all have originated in the State Government Committee, a Republican-led group that focusses on oversight. Kenyatta is in the committee’s Democratic minority, and is one of its most vocal members. Before the election, it put forward a resolution to establish an Election Integrity Committee, tasked with investigating potential election irregularities, and to grant the panel the power to summon election officials and impound ballot boxes. The effort seemed designed to drum up claims of voter fraud to support Trump in the case, then theoretical, that he refused to concede. It also seemed intended to stall the count: by some interpretations of the state’s constitution, if the governor is not able to certify the vote before December 8th, the Republican legislature could appoint its own electors. Kenyatta argued so vociferously against the resolution that the previous chair of the committee threatened to call security and have him removed. After Kenyatta and others exposed the effort, several Republicans, worried about their Election Day prospects, withdrew their support, and the committee was forced to scuttle it.
Last week, however, a new effort surfaced: a resolution to perform a statewide audit of the election. Dawn Keefer, a Republican member, argued for it, saying, “Public sentiment and the sheer volume of lawsuits filed, both before and since the election, warrants such investigatory action.” House Republicans held a press conference to air baseless claims that a company called Dominion Voting Systems had replaced Trump votes with votes for Joe Biden, and to demand that its representatives appear before the committee. “If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding from us?” Seth Grove, the chair of the Governance Committee, said. Keefer told me that thousands of Pennsylvanians had contacted her to demand an investigation. “Do I think there were cases of fraud? Yeah, there were,” she told me. She still wasn’t convinced that Biden was the legitimate victor. “I’m waiting to see the evidence to see the outcome of the election,” she said.
The audit was to be overseen by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee, and would scrutinize thousands of ballots, county by county. It would focus especially on claims that Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had created procedural inconsistencies in voting between counties, which Republicans argued could mean that thousands of votes in the state were unconstitutional. The effort could no longer stop certification; the governor announced that the Pennsylvania Department of State had certified Pennsylvania’s vote on Tuesday. But the audit seemed designed to cast doubt on the process and sow confusion, and perhaps to retroactively challenge the certification. “Claims that aren’t based in reality don’t deserve investigation,” Kenyatta told me. “What’s troubling is the strategic decision to bring them forward in the first place.”
One morning last week, in Harrisburg, the State Government Committee met to debate the resolution. Twelve Republicans and their staff members, some unmasked, sat at one end of a conference table in a room with sealed windows; six masked Democrats sat at the other end. (Although it is policy for staff members and capitol employees to wear masks, many Republican representatives refuse to wear them; in the past two weeks, at least two more House members tested positive for the coronavirus.) The committee was filled with hard-line Trump supporters. Cris Dush, a Republican member, gained notoriety in 2018 when he attempted to impeach four State Supreme Court justices for striking down the gerrymandering of certain districts. Last spring, Stephanie Borowicz, another member, took a selfie at a pro-gun rally with a man wearing a T-shirt from a group tied to white supremacists. In the stuffy room, she scrolled through her Instagram while the resolution was read.
Kenyatta questioned the narrative, quoted in the resolution, that the secretary of state and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court had caused confusion through their election policies. “The only reason that there is any confusion is that confusion has been stoked by members of this committee,” he said. The Democrats introduced one motion and five amendments to get the resolution thrown out, all of which failed to pass. Kevin Boyle, the Democratic committee chair, argued that the audit would serve only to bolster the false narrative, pushed by Trump, that the election had been stolen. “There is a broader movement of Trump supporters questioning the legitimacy of the vote,” Boyle said. After two hours, the resolution passed and headed to the floor.
After the vote, I approached Grove and asked if he doubted the results of the election. “Generally, I think there were some problems,” he said. If the committee uncovered fraud, the findings would be referred to law-enforcement officials. “There have been cases. Oversight operations have found it,” he told me. And, although he and others claimed that the audit wasn’t about overturning the results of the election, he didn’t rule out the possibility that the committee might eventually find Trump had really won, and somehow retroactively change the designation of Pennsylvania’s electors. “I’m not an attorney,” he said. “I don’t know the litigation risk of an audit two months later finding something and going back and overturning the election.” This seemed unlikely to happen, but Democrats still worried that the committee would do damage. “In the short term, this audit gives them cover to their constituents that they’re doing something about what Trump is tweeting about,” Boyle told me later. “But the long-term goal is to falsely delegitimize Joe Biden’s victory.”
Since the election, Trump has tweeted roughly once a day with claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. “The rate of rejected Mail-In Ballots is 30 X’s lower in Pennsylvania this year than it was in 2016,” he wrote recently. “This is why they kept our poll watchers and observers out of the ‘SACRED’ vote counting rooms!” Rudy Giuliani and Eric Trump have held press conferences; Fox News has maintained a steady drip of coverage. The effort has created a sense among Trump supporters in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, that the election in the state was illegitimate. Danielle Friel Otten, a state representative from Chester County, told me that she gets regular messages from constituents who doubt the results. “A man from my church wrote me to say he believed the fraud claims and trusted me not to be partisan in investigating them,” she told me. Unmasked Trump supporters have gathered daily in front of the capitol building and in the galleries, blocking some entrances, shouting, “Stop the Steal,” and singing “God Bless America.” Kadida Kenner, a progressive organizer, said that she was confronted by unmasked protesters who tried to hold debates up close. Several days later, she contracted COVID-19. “I can’t say with a hundred-per-cent certainty where I got it,” she said. “But, having to confront all of these people who refused to wear masks, it’s a logical conclusion.”
Voters in Pennsylvania have received phone calls from an organization called the Voter Integrity Project, which was founded several weeks ago, by Matt Braynard, who ran Trump’s 2016 data-and-strategy campaign. Braynard and several other Trump staffers have taken leave and are spending their days searching for voters who are potential victims of voter fraud. Braynard told me that they are currently calling people who hadn’t voted in a long time, but filed a ballot last month, and asking if they did so themselves. “The vast majority are saying ‘Yes,’ but some are saying, ‘No, and I’ll sign a statement to that fact,’ ” he claimed. The aim was to supply state legislatures or courts with information, and “to turn up the temperature” so that they had to pay attention. Braynard told me that he didn’t need a lot of evidence to cast doubt on the election’s legitimacy—just a representative sample. “It’s a little bit like a COVID test,” he said. “They might just find a couple of antibodies.”
Trump has launched a variety of legal cases in the state, alleging all manner of fraud. “As far as we’re concerned, Your Honor, those ballots could have been for Mickey Mouse,” Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, recently said, in a courtroom in Williamsport. Most of the cases have been thrown out for lack of evidence. Recently, a federal judge dismissed a sprawling suit, saying that the campaign had posed “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” with an intent to disenfranchise nearly seven million Pennsylvania voters. Bill McSwain, a state’s attorney and a Trump ally, was granted the power to investigate allegations of fraud by the Justice Department, but he has so far been unwilling to come to the President’s aid. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s District Attorney, told me that, in Trump’s “upside-down world,” Biden’s win is “characterized as being a close-enough margin that, yes, indeed, this could overturn Pennsylvania because of the sweeping fraud that is basically identified as follows: lots of my constituents are concerned and I have no evidence.” But he said that any legitimate scrutiny of the process has only reinforced Biden’s victory.
As a result, Trump has turned his attention to state politicians. He pressured officials in Georgia to call in the legislature, seemingly in the hope that they would block the certification of the vote and appoint electors who favor him. He has urged the Michigan legislature not to certify the results of the election, in an effort to do the same. He has taken a similar tack with Harrisburg. “Pennsylvania Party Leadership votes are this week,” Trump tweeted earlier this month. “I hope they pick very tough and smart fighters. We will WIN!!” Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told me that local politicians are in a tenuous position; if they lose Trump’s base, they could lose their next primary. “We have a situation with a politician who will do anything to win, and a party too weak to stop him,” she said. “They’re hoping by playing out the process, and entertaining investigations and recounts, that it will be enough to convince Trump that they did all they could.”
The audit in Pennsylvania was intended to focus on inconsistencies in election procedures. The day before the election, Kathy Boockvar, the secretary of the commonwealth, announced that, if counties received mail-in ballots that included mistakes, they could contact the voters and have them fill out provisional ballots, or contact parties and allow them to do so; some counties contacted voters—others simply threw out the ballots. Republicans argued that the inconsistency violates constitutional protections for equal treatment under the law. “The House wants to fixate on the alleged inconsistency across the state and claim that this violates the constitution,” Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., told me. Republicans claimed that the effort was nonpartisan. “This is not a campaign issue,” Jesse Topper, a state representative who sponsored the resolution, told me. “It’s purely legislative.” But it would likely result in challenges to mail-in ballots, which were cast predominantly for Biden.
Procedural inconsistencies served as part of the basis for Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case, from 2000, that stopped recounts in Florida’s vote and gave the election to George W. Bush. But Pildes told me that, if the case becomes a legal battle, it is unlikely that a court would invalidate votes. “The Court is not going to throw out votes from eligible voters whom election officials have told could cure a procedural defect in their initial absentee ballots,” he said. Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, told me that the committee is purely political theatre. Now that the vote was certified, there was no constitutional way to overturn the results. And Pennsylvania’s Department of State had conducted its own audit, so the House’s antics would be redundant. “They’re certainly welcome to do an audit and review,” Shapiro said. “But that will not change the timetable or change the outcome of the election.”
On November 19th, the resolution to begin the audit came to the House floor and passed 112–90. Kenyatta spoke out vehemently. “I told my colleagues that this constant drumbeat supporting what Trump is saying on Twitter has a corrosive effect on our democracy,” he told me. “Now every election—from school board to tax collector—now people who don’t win get to cry foul.” After the vote, Kenyatta worked with the organization OnePA on voter-protection efforts, to lead a grassroots campaign against the resolution. Support in Harrisburg seemed to be wavering. Grove told me that the White House scheduled a call between Republican legislators and Trump, though it never took place.
The last step required to approve the audit was a vote from the leadership of the Legislative Budget Finance Committee. The vote is typically a rubber stamp: the committee is charged with scores of audits each year, and it has not refused to comply in recent memory. But, during a hearing, its two Democratic leaders spoke against the resolution. “I’m at a loss as to what, what the purpose of the resolution is and why it’s even necessary,” Senator Jim Brewster, one of the leaders, said. The other, Representative Jake Wheatley, Jr., questioned whether the committee even had the authority to perform such an investigation, and called it a “wasted effort.” “I really suggest we put this to bed,” he said. The resolution failed, in a 2–1 vote. (One of the two Republican leaders was absent, though even a tie would have stopped the audit.)
Democrats rejoiced. “Public pressure works!” Kenyatta texted me. House Republicans were shocked. “Normally, it’s a done deal,” Grove told me afterward. Topper, who sponsored the resolution, said, “I’m disappointed. Anybody who thinks that changes don’t need to be made in our election laws isn’t grounded in reality.” Grove released a report that catalogued reports of fraud in the 2020 election, among other things. “There are individuals who believe the election was stolen from Trump and there was massive fraud, who want us to do more,” Grove told me. He said that Republicans would keep up the pressure, and might press again for electoral audits in January.
Several days later, Pennsylvania Republicans staged a faux legal hearing in Gettysburg, in which Giuliani played prosecutor before a panel of Republican state senators and representatives. State Senator Doug Mastriano spoke early on in the proceedings, saying, “We’re not kings—we’re agents of public opinion,” and adding that public opinion demanded an investigation into fraud. “Your election is a sham,” Giuliani said. Mastriano introduced poll watchers who told tales about phantom ballots, hacked machines, and dead voters, which they claimed had all led to an election stolen from Trump. “The Republic is angry, disgruntled, beaten up, tired, and ready to defend this country,” one poll watcher said. Trump called in to the hearing, and repeated his familiar claims of poll-watcher affidavits “piled up to the ceiling” and dead people voting. “This election was rigged and we can’t let that happen!” he said.
Nevertheless, Trump’s efforts appear to be floundering. In Georgia, the secretary of state certified the vote, noting that he was a “proud” Trump supporter but that “the numbers don’t lie.” The Republican chair of the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona, certified the vote, saying that, although he’d been pressured to block it, he would not “violate the law or deviate from my own moral compass.” Lawmakers from Michigan used their White House meeting with Trump to deliver a letter requesting more federal funding for COVID-19 relief. Afterward, the State Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield issued a joint statement promising to respect the vote: “As legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
The efforts may still be harmful. “Democracy can survive with the feeling that the country chose poorly,” Ahmed, the political scientist, told me. “But it’s much harder to survive with thinking that the winner is not going to be in power.” Even if Trump does not succeed in using courts or legislatures to change the results of the election, the fact that such efforts have gone so far may make it easier for similar ones to succeed in the future. They have also left a large portion of the country—three out of four Republicans, according to a Monmouth University Poll—doubting the fairness of the election, which will likely be damaging to Biden’s Presidency. Ahmed said, of Trump, “In a Presidency that has done a lot of damage, this is the most dangerous thing he’s done.”
Recently, I sat down for lunch with Kenyatta in Harrisburg, in a restaurant a few hundred yards from the capitol. “I have no idea why, but this seems to be a Democratic restaurant,” he told me. Kenyatta is one of Pennsylvania’s twenty electors, and, on December 14th, he will submit his vote for Biden. He feels ambivalent about the task. “I hate the Electoral College,” he told me, noting that the institution was created to empower slave states, and that he believes it should be abolished. “It’s a vestige of our original sin and serves no practical purpose other than to piss people off.” But he was glad to be giving his vote to the President-elect. “I hope these Electoral College votes are the last that are cast,” he told me. “But I’ll be casting it happy knowing that Biden’s election has saved us from authoritarianism.”
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