Pennsylvania Republicans spent $1 million in tax dollars on 2020 election lawsuits to suppress voters

GettyImages 1284103761 — A woman participates in a protest in support of counting all votes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 2020.
Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Pennsylvania Republicans spent $1.04 million in taxpayer dollars on 2020 election lawsuits.
That's according to documents obtained Thursday by the news organization PA Spotlight.
Republicans had sought to disenfranchise millions of people who voted by mail.
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Pennsylvania Republicans spent more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars on litigation aimed at making it more difficult to vote ahead of the 2020 election, according to documents obtained by the news organization PA Spotlight. Over $650,000 went to the same law firm that tried and failed to place Kanye West on the ballot in another swing state.

In a post on Thursday, PA Spotlight revealed that the Pennsylvania Senate Republican Caucus, which controls the commonwealth's upper chamber, spent a total of $1,042,200 in the runup to November trying to restrict methods of voting. In particular, the state GOP sought to overturn key provisions of Act 77, a law passed in 2019 - with unanimous support from Senate Republicans - that allowed voters to request mail-in ballots for any reason.

At the time, the Pennsylvania state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman called the legislation "the most historic reform bill we've done." But as time went on, Republicans began to see the measure as a boon to their political opponents, with Democratic voters far more likely to vote by mail during the pandemic. The Senate GOP also sought to prevent those ballots from being placed in secure drop boxes and to throw out millions of mail-in votes altogether, an effort rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

According to PA Spotlight, money on such litigation went to two firms, the bulk of it going to Holtzman, Vogel, Josefiak, and Torchinksy, founded by a former lawyer for the Republican National Committee. That firm also tried to place Kanye West on the ballot in Wisconsin.

Obermayer, Rebmann, Maxell, and Hippell also received just under $385,000 in tax collars for election work in Pennsylvania. Lawrence Tabas, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, is a partner at the firm, PA Spotlight reported.

Neither Tabas nor the Senate Republican Caucus immediately responded to Insider's requests for comment.

In the meantime, having lost in the courts, Pennsylvania Republicans are turning to legislation: On Thursday, state Sen. Doug Mastriano - who spent thousands of dollars busing protesters to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen - introduced a bill that would eliminate "no excuse" mail-in voting.

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