Tricia Cunningham: Corman, Mastriano act tough on election integrity, but they caused the problems

If you care about election integrity, there are a couple of Republican senators running for governor who you may want to scratch off your list. Both Sen. Jake Corman and Sen. Doug Mastriano are scurrying around the commonwealth claiming to want to get to the bottom of what happened in Pennsylvania’s chaotic 2020 presidential election, but they were complicit in causing the problems.

Both Corman and Mastriano supported the now-notorious Act 77, which was at the heart of all of the electoral confusion last year.

Act 77 ushered in no-excuse mail-in voting for Pennsylvania for the first time. To gauge the impact of such a radical change, consider that in 2016 — the previous presidential election — fewer than 300,000 Pennsylvanians voted by mail. In 2020, that number was over 2.6 million.

Local elections officials and their staffs were not prepared, trained or equipped to handle such a monumental tide of mail-in ballots.

Most states that have gone to mass mail-in ballot regimes have taken years to implement them and smooth out the kinks. In Pennsylvania, the engineers of Act 77 put it on the books for its first use in a massive turnout presidential election. This was not the brightest idea of all time.

Many of the issues of 2020 can be linked to Act 77.

Anticipating the avalanche of mailed ballots, the ideological secretary of state and the partisan Pennsylvania Supreme Court defied the law and repeatedly changed deadlines and guidance to elections officials all the way up to Election Day.

When the time came to count the ballots, there was mayhem and lawlessness. Trump campaign poll watchers were evicted from some counting locations and barred from others. In some cases, vote counters placed cardboard on interior windows to prevent watchers from seeing what was happening in the count rooms. Other observers were kept penned in, too far away from the count tables to see what was happening.

As expected, so many people were voting by mail for the very first time that they frequently made mistakes while filling out their ballots. In Philadelphia and Allegheny County, areas dominated by Democratic voters, people who made errors were invited to come in and repair their ballots. Voters in more Trump-leaning jurisdictions were not afforded that opportunity. This was unconstitutional disparate treatment of voters who were participating in the same election.

But the uneven application of standards goes further and is systemic. People voting in person must be present at the polling location, sign a ledger and interact with local poll workers who may be personally familiar with them. People who vote by mail do not undergo the same scrutiny.

Corman, who is the Pennsylvania Senate president pro tempore, wholeheartedly embraced Act 77’s passage.

Calling it an “election modernization plan,” Corman tweeted that it was “probably the most historic reform bill we’ve done, not only in my time, but in decades.”

In a story that celebrated the passage of Act 77, he told CNN, “What’s important is that people have faith in the system.”

The immense irony in that statement is apparently lost on Corman, as he has now seized control of an attempted statewide audit of the 2020 election, presumably to curry favor with former President Trump, who still contests the results.

Incredibly, Corman today says he is leading the audit because he wants to “make sure we have a process in place that people have faith in.”

This is exactly what he said to CNN when he backed Act 77 in the first place. The mind reels at the sheer political brazenness of the man.

But Mastriano is no better. He also voted for Act 77 in the Pennsylvania Senate, but now appears to seek to repeal it and have a do-over.

For a while, he was using his position in the Legislature to lead a partial audit of a small number of selected counties until he was stymied by local officials’ refusal to participate. Perhaps thinking he was putting Mastriano in his place, Corman snatched the audit mantle away from him.

But Mastriano waited for months to launch his embarrassingly amateurish election audit quest, which calls into question his dedication to the cause and invites questions about his motives.

Clearly, like Corman, Mastriano covets the support of Trump, so much so that he falsely claimed to have already secured an endorsement. He got smacked down for that by Trump’s team.

The bottom line is that there are at least two Republican candidates for governor who participated in messing up the 2020 election and now want to run away from it as fast as they can.

Republican primary voters in 2022 should remember their names: Corman and Mastriano.

Tricia Cunningham is a conservative activist from Westmoreland County.