Hennessey doesn’t regret opposing Pa. electors

State Rep. Tim Hennessey, R26th Dist., said this week he does not regret signing a letter asking for Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to be challenged in Congress on Jan. 6 despite the violence at U.S. Capitol that day.

Hennessey said “absolutely not” when asked if he thought the Dec. 4 letter signed by himself and 63 other Republican state legislators played any role in the violence on Jan. 6.

“I was shocked and appalled by what happened,” Hennessy said.

State Sen. Bob Mensch, R-24th

Dist., signed a similar letter on Jan. 4, asking for a delay in the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes, at least until the results of a U.S. Supreme Court Case regarding Pennsylvania’s voting are known.

Mensch has not return phone calls seeking comment on the letter, although he did issue a statement Jan. 5 condemning the violence at the capitol.

Both the rioters and the legislators sought to prevent Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes from being certified by both houses of Congress.

A Dec. 4 letter to Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation, Hennessey was joined by 63 other state House Republicans in writing: “We the undersigned members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly urge you to object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

Those objections were made, but not sustained.

And shortly after the vote to certify the Electoral College results began in Congress, a vote that would cement Joe Biden’s election as the next president, all hell broke loose.

A crowd, many of them wearing Donald Trump paraphernalia and some carrying Confederate flags, broke into the Capitol building and, according to the latest reports, sought out Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused to invalidate the Electoral College votes, as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

However, Hennessey said he believes the two things are unrelated.

He reasoned that even if Pennsylvania’s votes were thrown out, “it would not be enough to change the results of the election. The election is over, Biden won,” Hennessey said.

He also dismissed questions about how he could question the efficacy of the same election that handed him his 14th term in office.

That question was raised last month by Hennessey’s opponent in the November election, Owen J. Roberts School Board member Paul Friel.

“If Tim doesn’t feel the election was valid, perhaps he should step down,” Friel told MediaNews Group. Hennessey had not returned calls seeking comment for that article.

“It’s disingenuous for someone to accept the results of an election that returns them to office, but then seek to invalidate the part of the election that didn’t go the way they wanted,” Friel said.

Hennessey said “if the argument is more Democratic votes at the top of the ticket, it wouldn’t change the results further down the ticket. But no one is fooling around with results.”

Rather, he said, his objection was to the four points outlined in the letter.

They are laid out as such:

• The Pennsylvania Election Code requires that all mail-in ballots be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day; Governor Wolf ordered that this statutory deadline be waived in some counties during the Primary Election, then sought its waiver statewide for the General Election.

• The Pennsylvania Election Code prohibits counties from inspecting ballots prior to 7 a.m. on Election Day; Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State issued guidance encouraging counties to ignore this prohibition, to inspect ballots, and to contact voters with deficient ballots prior to Election Day.

• The Pennsylvania Election Code prohibits the counting of defective absentee or mail-in ballots; Encouraged by the Department of State, some county boards of elections ignored this prohibition, and have proceeded to include thousands of defective ballots in the certified count.

• The Pennsylvania Election Code authorizes poll watchers to be selected by candidates and political parties and to observe the process of pre-canvassing and canvassing absentee and mail-in ballots; Certain counties in Pennsylvania prohibited these authorized individuals from meaningfully observing the pre-canvassing and canvassing activities.

These particular issues were all challenged in the courts and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court approved those changes, something Hennessey argues the court did not have the statutory authority to do, which is why it was appealed to the Supreme Court.

And it is why Hennessey said he does not regret signing the letter, because he said those changes to voting procedure need to be settled, adding he suspects that is something the legislature will do in the next session.

An election reform bill, including a broad increase to allow for mail-in voting, was adopted on a bipartisan basis last year. But, Hennessey said, the changes implemented by the Wolf administration went beyond what those changes allowed.

He allowed that a global pandemic that made inperson voting riskier, and the hobbling of the Post Office, were factors voters had to take into account when picking a voting method, But, he said, rules must be followed.

“If I get stuck in traffic and I arrive at the polls five minutes after they close and I bang on the door, they’re not going to let me in,” Hennessey said.

Rather than make allowances for those factors, which is how the Wolf administration justified the voting changes it implemented, Hennessey said voters “should plan better.”

State Rep. Tim Hennessey