Election board certifies ’22 results
Deputies called after crowd gets raucous
Sheriff’s deputies were called to a meeting of the Allegheny County Board of Elections on Monday after the crowd of about 30 began loudly jeering as the board prepared to certify the Nov. 8 midterm election results.
In the end, the three-member board unanimously certified results in all but 12 of the county’s 1,323 precincts. A group of voters petitioned county Common Pleas Court for recounts in those 12 precincts, though county lawyers told the board the petitions are “defective” because the voters failed to pay a $50 fee required for recount requests.
The handful of votes in those 12 precincts aren’t enough to swing the results of any elections, County executive and board chairman Rich Fitzgerald said after the meeting at the County Courthouse, Downtown.
The Department of State says only “legally valid and properly filed” recount petitions can prompt a county to withhold certification for the office targeted by the recount effort.
“We will review what Allegheny submits to the department and then decide next steps,” the Department of State said in an emailed statement.
Several in the crowd had asked the board, during the public comment period, not to certify the results. Some cited claims that had been investigated and debunked, others provided no evidence for their allegations.
One woman claimed to have photos of a precinct’s printed,
election-night results that showed hundreds more votes cast for Republican candidates than are shown in totals posted on the county’s website. When a reporter asked her after the meeting to see the photos, she refused and declined to answer questions.
The board will likely certify the remaining 12 precincts after the petitions asking for a recount make their way through the courts, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The petitions are part of a statewide drive organized by elements of a movement fueled by conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud that arose after the 2020 election. Social media posts asked supporters to file the petitions after GOP losses in both the governor’s and U.S. Senate races this year.
The Allegheny County filings include identical language in each petition, with spaces left for voters to fill in the particulars for each precinct — “boilerplate” that fails to cite any specific reason that a judge should order a recount, said Assistant County Solicitor Allan Opsitnick.
As Mr. Opsitnick explained to the board why he believed a judge would quickly toss out the 12 petitions — and why they could certify the entirety of the results Monday — the restless crowd grew raucous, with one man yelling “Cheater!” and at least one woman making an obscene gesture toward the board.
Mr. Fitzgerald threatened to clear the room if they didn’t calm down, after which three uniformed deputies arrived and stood behind the seated crowd. No one was arrested.
Conspiracy theories about the 2022 midterms are notably more muted than after the 2020 election, when former President Donald Trump’s repeated lies about widespread fraud sowed enduring doubts about the reliability of American democracy. Attacks on the 2020 election culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the
U.S. Capitol.
This time around, one of the most vocal supporters of Mr. Trump’s false claims — state Sen. and Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano — conceded his race to Attorney General Josh Shapiro, taking some of the wind out of the election-denial movement in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Fitzgerald on Monday said much of the credit also belongs to Allegheny County election workers, who tallied mail-in votes throughout Election Day so the results could be reported almost immediately after polls closed.
“You posted those results at 8:02 [p.m.] on Election Night, the mail-in ballots. I think that goes a long way to give people surety that people aren’t finding ballots in the back room, that kind of thing,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The 577,000 votes recorded in Allegheny County surpassed the number of ballots cast in any county in the state, even outpacing Philadelphia, the state’s most populous county, by almost 70,000.