FETTERMAN’S SPEECH
Pa.’s lieutenant governor praises Texas Democrats who fled state over
Speaking to state House Democrats in Texas who recently fled their state to stall GOP voting legislation that they said amounted to voter suppression, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said Friday that the idea of voter fraud is “fiction” and is being used by Republicans to disguise suppressive laws.
Mr. Fetterman, a 2022 U.S. Senate candidate and one of the most vocal Democrats in Pennsylvania on the issue of voting rights, said in a virtual keynote address that Texas Democrats have drawn attention on a national scale to the kind of voter suppression that’s being attempted at state capitals across the country.
It was the latest effort by Mr. Fetterman to frame his candidacy as a close ally to the voting rights movement in a state where former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud were bounced by the courts but embraced by many Republican leaders.
The lieutenant governor said Democrats need to continue to fight against those efforts and insisted they have in Pennsylvania. He cited Gov. Tom Wolf’s recent veto of a GOP-backed election reform package that would have required voters to show ID when they vote in person, accusing Republicans of trying to suppress the vote of the people they don’t think will vote for them.
GOP leaders said the bill was intended to modernize the election system and make it more secure and decried Mr. Wolf’s veto because the legislation also gave county election officials and Democrats items on their wish list, including more time for counties to pre-canvass ballots.
Mr. Wolf had cited the expansion of voter ID, restrictions on ballot drop boxes and signature matches for mail-in ballots as reasons for his veto. But last week, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he’d be “fine” with “a reasonable voter ID solution,” leading Republicans to reintroduce their bill and call for the start of new negotiations. The governor later told The Associated Press that his position hadn’t changed, and that he hasn’t seen any way of expanding the state’s voter ID law that he doesn’t view as being more restrictive or suppressing the vote.
Universal voter ID is “insidious and unnecessary,” Mr. Fetterman said, because it would risk disenfranchising thousands of Pennsylvania residents who don’t have access to ID at any given time — and because there’s no such thing as voter fraud, he added.
“It is rare, it is always caught and it is never materially important to the outcome,” Mr. Fetterman said, adding that the few instances of voter fraud Pennsylvania did experience in 2020 were supporters of Mr. Trump voting on behalf of their dead relatives.
Mr. Fetterman said if he’s elected to the Senate, he would vote in favor of ending the filibuster and “enacting the kind of voting laws this country needs in order to protect and provide universal voting access and push back all of these laws instituted in states like yours and attempted in states like mine.”
On Twitter, he has written that he’d support the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Asked if he would come testify in Texas if the Legislature there held hearings on voter fraud, Mr. Fetterman said he would — and appeared to denounce the seemingly strict punishments of two people in Texas who were convicted of illegally voting, including one woman who faces a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in 2016 while she was on supervised release for a federal conviction.
“You look at the severity of those penalties — in Pennsylvania, there wasn’t anything like that. It was probation,” Mr. Fetterman said.