After President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, he and his allies were pushing false narratives about the election being stolen, pressuring state and local officials, and calling for audits of the results.
In Fulton County, Pennsylvania, a Republican stronghold where Trump won a larger percentage of the vote than anywhere else in the state, local leaders wanted to help.
“Sending this email to see what’s going on with this rigged election,” County Commissioner Randy Bunch, a Republican, wrote to state Sen. Judy Ward, also a Republican, in a Nov. 12 email obtained by watchdog group American Oversight. “We can’t let this election get stolen if there is anything I can do please let me know.”
A few weeks later, according to court documents, the county let an outside company examine its voting machines and download data from them. In text messages sent shortly afterwards, one county commissioner said that if the county hadn’t given the company access, a Trump ally would have forced it to do so via a subpoena.
That decision to allow a third party to access sensitive voting equipment set off far-reaching consequences for Fulton County. As a result of a state order, it had to purchase all-new voting equipment. After years of legal proceedings, the county is facing more than $1 million in fines, an amount equal to roughly one-eighth of the county’s yearly budget.
“It sure is a mess,” said Paula Shives, a Democrat who was a county commissioner at the time, but didn’t approve granting access to the voting equipment. “And unfortunately, it looks like the residents of Fulton County will be responsible for the damages.”
Five years later, election officials in predominantly Republican counties around the country are again getting requests to inspect their voting equipment in connection with the 2020 election.
Recently, The Washington Post reported that a Republican consultant reached out to clerks in Colorado to ask if they would allow a third party to review whether their voting machines complied with federal law. The consultant claimed to be cooperating with “officials working on the President’s executive order.”
A representative of the U.S. Department of Justice also recently approached counties in Missouri asking for access to election equipment used during the 2020 election, though the exact purpose of the request was unclear.
In both cases, officials said they declined the requests. But Lawrence Norden, vice president of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center, noted that election officials in other states might act differently.
“This is just one more thing that election officials are going to have to grapple with,” he said. “They need support from the states to make clear to them what the rules are and the protocols are for dealing with the request for access to the equipment.”
All of this gives new relevance to the choices officials in Fulton County made five years ago — and the expensive consequences the county is still dealing with today.
Commissioner asks: ‘Who authorized this?’
Fulton County sits along the state’s southern border with Maryland west of Gettysburg. Its roughly 15,000 residents are reliable Republicans who haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson won the state by a landslide.
Even though Trump romped to victory in Fulton County in 2020, two Republican commissioners there still pushed for an audit in the chaotic period following the election.
Court documents say Bunch and fellow Republican Commissioner Stuart Ulsh allowed a Pennsylvania-based technology company called Wake TSI to “inspect and copy components of” its Dominion Voting election equipment. Wake TSI was also involved in the review of the Maricopa County, Arizona, 2020 election.
Wake TSI was contracted at the time to a nonprofit company run by pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who was challenging election results around the country, according to The Washington Post.
Text messages obtained by American Oversight showed that pressure from a Pennsylvania state senator, Doug Mastriano, may have contributed to the county’s decision to let Wake TSI examine its machines. According to the Post, Mastriano, who is from neighboring Franklin County, told Trump he could arrange an audit in the state, something Trump and his allies had been pushing for.
Shives, who found out after the fact that the examination had gone ahead, expressed consternation in a group text message with the other two commissioners, the records show.
“Who did that?” she asked.
Patti Hess, then the county’s election director, replied with a photo of paperwork from Wake TSI, adding that it was “sent by Senator Mastriano” and that “all counties are to do this.”
“‘All counties are to do this’ by whose order?” Shives asked. “Who authorized this? When was it scheduled? Who was notified and who was present during this process?”
“It was happening this way or in a subpoena,” Ulsh said after some back and forth.
No county appears to have ever received a subpoena in connection with Mastriano’s review.
Why state law restricts access to voting equipment
After commissioners released Wake TSI’s report — which uncovered no fraud — on the county’s website, officials at the Pennsylvania Department of State were alarmed that the county had given a non-governmental outside organization access to its voting equipment. State laws and regulations require such equipment to be kept secure and accessible only to a limited number of government officials and employees of the manufacturer in order to prevent the introduction of any malware.
Attempts to access voting systems occurred elsewhere around the country. In Coffee County, Georgia, Trump attorneys and local election officials allowed an outside company to access voting equipment, which factored into an indictment against Trump and those officials, though that case has since stalled.
In Colorado, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters received a nine-year prison sentence for allowing an outside individual to access and copy data on voting machines. Peters is appealing her conviction, and Trump has advocated for her release.
Trevor Timmons, a former chief information officer with the Colorado Department of State who now serves as chief technology officer with elections consulting firm The Election Group, said access to voting equipment across the country is generally “severely limited.” Poll workers will have some access, needed to run the machines on Election Day, with election directors and vendors typically having the type of higher-level access needed to program machines.
The logic behind keeping access tight is that if someone has physical access to the machine’s programing, they could potentially reprogram the machine to influence the outcome of elections. For example, he said, in a demonstration at a recent hacking conference, he saw someone add the letters “il” in front of the word “legal” in a ballot question, changing the meaning of a question on marijuana legalization.
In the Mesa County case, Peters “allowed somebody in and they imaged the disk, they got a copy of everything that was sitting on that disk,” he said. “To a sophisticated attacker, it allows them to make it easier to learn how the system works and to customize targeted attacks against that software and against those hardware devices.”
County defies court order
In July 2021 the state decertified Fulton County’s machines, telling county officials that no one could “verify that the impacted components of Fulton County’s leased voting system are safe to use in future elections”
The county sued the state over the decertification, and while that case was playing out, the Department of State secured an order from the state Supreme Court temporarily barring any more third-party access to the equipment.
But there was more to the story.
Fulton County had separately sued Dominion Voting for breach of contract, claiming Dominion “failed to provide a system that was free from defects and compliant.” As part of that lawsuit, county officials allowed another company, Speckin Forensics, to examine the machines — an inspection that occurred after the Supreme Court order went into effect.
The Department of State asked the courts to hold the county in contempt for violating the order. After two years of litigation, a special master appointed by the state Supreme Court ordered the county and its attorney to pay $711,252.21 to the department and $324,672.88 to Dominion Voting.
Ulsh, who lost his 2023 reelection bid, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that he didn’t want to talk about the decision to allow Wake TSI’s examination and the aftermath, calling it “fake news.”
A bill awaits the county’s taxpayers
The county is nearly out of options to avoid paying the fine. It recently lost an appeal in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its breach-of-contract case against Dominion, but it also is separately appealing to the state Supreme Court its loss in the case the county had brought against the Department of State.
Both the Department of State and Dominion Voting said they hadn’t yet been paid. Last week, Dominion was purchased by a new company, Liberty Vote. A spokesperson for the new company did not return a request for comment.
“I don’t know how the current board of commissioners are going to (pay) that,” said Shives, who lost her reelection bid in 2023.
Bunch, who is still a commissioner, did not respond to a call seeking comment, or an email to him and the other two current commissioners asking how the county would pay the bill if its appeals are unsuccessful.
“I thought they were crazy,” said Stanley Kerlin, a local attorney and Republican who served as solicitor for the county’s board of elections from 1981 to 2019. “They got sold a bill of goods that that machine was no good and it doesn’t count votes correctly.”
He said it was illogical, in his view, that a conspiracy would involve Fulton County, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And if commissioners had doubts about the performance of the machines, he said, a better move would have been hand-counting a precinct or two.
Now, as a result, he said, the county will have “squandered” hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
Kerlin said the commissioners have said they won’t increase taxes to pay the fine. The other option, taking it out of the county’s savings account, still requires taxpayers to foot the bill.
Kerlin said the audit and the fine don’t get talked about much in the county, which shocks him.
“I think a lot of people don’t understand it,” he said, but added, “they’ll understand when they see the headline that the county has to pay ($700,000) to the state.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
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