Pennsylvania seeks legal costs from county over voting machine access

HARRISBURG, Pa. — A rural Pennsylvania county and its elected officials may have to pay the state elections agency hundreds of thousands of dollars to reimburse it for legal fees and litigation costs in a threeyear battle over allowing outsiders to examine voting machines to help former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud.

Last week, Secretary of State Al Schmidt asked a “special master” appointed by the Supreme Court to order the Republican-controlled Fulton County government, Commissioner Randy Bunch, former Commissioner Stuart Ulsh and their lawyer Thomas Carroll

to repay the state an updated total of $711,000 for outside counsel’s legal fees and related costs.

Most of the latest set of $263,000 in fees, wrote Schmidt’s lawyers, came about because the Fulton officials “requested an evidentiary hearing regarding the appointment of a third-party escrow agent to take possession of the voting machines at issue — and then did everything in their power to delay and obstruct both the hearing itself and, more generally, the impoundment of the voting machines ordered by the Supreme Court.”

The reimbursement request was made based on a decision against the county issued by the high court in April.

The state Supreme Court this week also cautioned Fulton County officials that they must go through a lower-court judge before turning over voting equipment after the commissioners decided to allow a lawyer who has sought to reverse Trump’s 2020 reelection loss to “utilize” the evidence for her clients “with common interests.”

The county’s lawyer defended the 2-1 vote by the Fulton Board of Commissioners in December to provide Trump ally Stefanie Lambert, a Michigan attorney, with “evidence” used by the outside groups that the GOP officials let examine the Dominion Voting Systems Inc. machines in 2021 and 2022.