Here are some PA Headlines from around the state:
HARRISBURG — Spotlight PA is reporting…The Pennsylvania state senator in charge of a key election committee is backing an audit of the November presidential contest similar to Arizona’s partisan ballot review, four days after former President Donald Trump called him out and claimed he was dragging his feet.
State Senator David Argall (Photo provided)
Despite two audits and assurances from every level of government that the election was free of widespread fraud, Sen. David Argall (R., Schuylkill) told Spotlight PA he does not see the “damage in doing it one more time to try to answer the concerns that people have.”
But such an effort, particularly if advanced by just one political party, will be sure to attract criticism and come with critical questions, including how much it would cost, who would pay for it, and why it would be any more trustworthy than the widely accepted audits already completed.
Argall’s counterpart in the state House has rejected an additional audit, but the Senate is able to order its own review, and Argall’s committee has the power to subpoena ballots, “The results are the results,” Argall said Friday during Spotlight PA’s Capitol Live event, when asked if he accepted November’s results as legitimate. “The Electoral College has spoken, you know the president has been sworn in. I understand that’s a reality.”
County election and state officials, as well as Trump’s own attorney general, have repeatedly said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania, and that the results were accurate and reflected the will of voters across the state. Yet Pennsylvania has been and continues to be the focus of Trump and his most ardent supporters, who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen. Many Republican lawmakers, including leadership in the House, signed on to a letter calling for Congress to reject the state’s electors for President Joe Biden, while prominent senators, including Argall, asked the body to delay certification of the Electoral College because of “inconsistent and questionable activities.”
On Monday, Trump targeted Argall as well as state Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Centre), demanding an audit and asking if they were “stupid, corrupt, or naive?” “I feel certain that if Corman continues along this path of resistance, with its lack of transparency, he will be primaried and lose by big numbers,” the former president said in a statement.
Despite sustained efforts by Trump and some Republicans across the U.S. to cast doubt on the results of the election, Argall said, “I don’t know why people are so mistrusting of the results.” “I just know that they are,” he said. Argall said he was focused on the process, including decisions by the state Supreme Court and the Wolf administration that “completely ignored” what lawmakers intended when they passed a major election overhaul in 2019 that, among other things, instituted universal mail voting.
HARRISBURG – Penn Capital-Star is reporting…Gov. Tom Wolf’s approval ratings have taken a post-pandemic hit among Keystone State voters, with barely four in 10 (39 percent) saying he’s doing an excellent or good job, down from 52 percent in July 2020, according to a new Franklin & Marshall College poll.
That 13-point drop is tied to a pessimism about the future among state residents, with only a third saying they believe the commonwealth is heading in the right direction, which is unchanged since the last Franklin & Marshall poll in March, but down significantly from the 57 percent who believed the state was heading in the right direction in October 2019.
That pessimism comes despite lessening concerns about the pandemic, and an increase in vaccination rates, the poll showed. Nearly eight in 10 respondents (79 percent) say they’ve had at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, a dramatic increase from March when 31 percent said they’d had at least one dose
More Democrats (94 percent) and independents (84 percent) than Republicans (61 percent) said they’d gotten the jab, pollsters said. And as lawmakers take up a suite of controversial reforms to the state’s voting laws, nearly six in 10 voters say they believe Pennsylvania’s voting law need to be updated. That belief is stronger among Republicans (75 percent) than among independents (52 percent) or Democrats (46 percent).
Overall, a majority of respondents say they favor signature matching for mail-in ballots (81 percent) and photo identification requirements (74 percent), while voters are divided about eliminating no-excuse voting by mail.
