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More mush from Dush

RICHARD MORRIS

Lock Haven

Once again (Column, Oct. 5) 25th District state Sen. Cris Dush tries to feed us a poisonous stew of false analogy and mis-stated fact in defense of his forensic audit of the election.

He is upset at the outcry against his attempt to subpoena voter records from the Department of State because there was no such outcry when the Auditor General undertook an audit of those records in 2019.

Here’s the reason for the difference. The Auditor General is an officer of the Commonwealth elected by and responsible to the people.

His examination was to establish the accuracy and security of the records. Sen. Dush, on the other hand, proposes to dump 9 million records into the hands of an as-yet anonymous private contractor appointed by and responsible to Sen. Dush alone, for some purpose about which the Senator has been somewhat vague.

We are supposed to believe that the Auditor General’s report “documented..hundreds of thousands of problem records.”

We don’t believe that because we have read the report and that phrase appears nowhere in it. What is does document is 24,408 “potential” cases of duplicate driver license numbers and 2,991 “potential” cases of the names of deceased persons still on the voter record.

If Sen. Dush was serious about conducting a genuinely transparent examination of the most recent elections he would place before his committee for its agreement a set of goals and procedures for conducting it.

He would then solicit bids from external contractors (if such were required) and invite his committee to select one. He would establish with his committee a time-line, a cost and a source of funds, and proceed accordingly. He has done none of that. He and other Republican Senators continue to claim that their constituents are “angry.” Of course they are — the former President had been stoking that anger since well before the last election with claims that “the only way I can lose is if there is fraud.”

He lost, therefore there was fraud. A child of nine could see the flaw on that logic, but not the MAGAts.

Trump clearly operates on the Nixon principle that a firm grip on the sensitive areas of a chap’s anatomy will secure his conformity to one’s wishes. This explains why Republicans in Harrisburg are facing all ways at once on election reform.

The Senate’s State Government Committee (Chair, Argall, Vice Chair, Dush) proposes a number of measures aimed at easing the burden on county election officials in the management of mail-in ballots and other issues, Mostly these are sensible proposals.

The Intergovernmental Operations Committee (chair, Dush, member Argall) threatens to tramp over the same ground and either duplicate or negate those proposals.

Sens. Corman and Mastrianare also members of both committees.

The latter is on record as favoring the elimination of mail-in ballots and allowing poll watchers to operate at any precinct in the state. In other words that is the formation of rapid response units to be deployed to ensure that voters vote the right way. What could be more toxic?

I fear that we will have to live with this nonsense for a good while yet. The Arizona audit of a little over two million votes took some five months to complete.

Sen. Dush proposes to examine nine and a half million voter records, so that will just run and run.

As it is intended to.

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