April 9, 2022

PA State Senator Misleads His Constituents. Again.

From PA State Senator Mastriano's "News" page on his official website, we find this:

Sen. Doug Mastriano (PA-33) successfully offered an amendment to ensure timely removal of deceased registered voters from the SURE system.

This is all part of the "Pennsylvania has a broken election system" cloud of arguments. Doug's fan base so hated losing (by 79,000 votes or so) Pennsylvania to President Joe Biden during the 2020 election that so their solution is to claim a rigged election system here in PA.

That claim is a lie. A big lie. There's no evidence of a rigged election in PA (or accros the US for that matter). Joe Biden won. Donald Trump lost. That's reality. Claiming a rigged election is a lie.

Part of the lie is to undermine the credibility of Pennsylvania's election system and here we see an attack on the SURE system.

And Doug offers up some sure-fired "evidence" for how unreliable PA's election system is:

“In 2020 report, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) provided the Department of State with the names of at least 21,000 deceased registrants who remained on the voter rolls less than a month before the 2020 election,” said Sen. Mastriano. “We must avoid this kind of egregious error in the future. My amendment will allow counties to have the most up to date information to ensure registration records are accurate and that all deceased voters are removed from the rolls well before an election.”

Too bad the "fact" of "at least 21,000 deceased registrants" is itself unreliable.

Factcheck.org, uh, fact checked the number exactly a year ago today:

A misleading claim that more than 21,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania are dead is circulating online. The figure comes from a conservative group that failed to convince a federal judge in October that its list was accurate.

Specifically:

[T]he claim is misleading. It’s based on a lawsuit filed by a conservative organization called the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which regularly brings voting-related lawsuits against states.

The case was filed on Oct. 15, about two weeks before Election Day. It alleged that more than 21,000 voters registered in Pennsylvania were dead and asked that the court order the state to remove them from the rolls before the election.

The federal judge hearing the case declined to do so.

Instead, Judge John Jones III cited PILF’s questionable methodology in developing its purported list of ineligible voters, its decision to file the suit at the “eleventh hour,” and the fact that Pennsylvania’s system for stripping deceased voters from the rolls appears to work. [Emphasis added.]

This was posted a year ago

And yet Doug is shoveling this mislead to his constituents as if it were rock solid true. 

As we know, this is not the first time Doug has mislead his constituents. We've seen him previously mislead about ivermectin. In that instance he told them that ivermectin has had a "record of success" across the world in dealing with Covid-19 when it definitely has not had any success at that at all.

Presumably, he's been misleading for a while. Good for him, bearing false witness and all.

By the way, there's an interesting Mastriano coincidence when it comes to PILF - specifically its Board of Directors

Among the directors is John C Eastman, author of those infamous Eastman Memos.

John Eastman has been subpoenaed by the January 6 committee.

And so has Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano!

He's yet to respond or even publicly acknowledge the subpoena.

Why is that, Doug?