Mark Lindeman, a political scientist who has written on and consulted on post-election audits, said many people have experience in working closely with various kinds of election records and equipment, such as paper ballots, vote totals and registration and voting records.
“Experience matters because novices can misinterpret the routine quirks of elections as anomalies or evidence of fraud,” said Lindeman, who works for Verified Voting, which advocates for election integrity and the responsible use of election technology.
For instance, Lindeman said, Republicans’ widely discredited election “audit” carried out in Arizona’s Maricopa County was riddled with unfounded allegations based on basic misunderstandings.
“Inexperienced, partisan consultants tend to leap to invidious conclusions,” Lindeman said. “They shouldn’t lead serious investigations.”
Lahr said he sees himself bipartisan and fair, and has no pre-conceived notions about the task before him.
However, the man who hired Lahr’s firm, Sen. Cris Dush, R-Jefferson, signed a letter last year urging Congress to object to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes being cast for Democrat Joe Biden, despite a certified victory of more than 80,000 votes.
In a Facebook post last Jan. 1, Dush proclaimed that “there was no election. There was a scam.”
Even if Republican senators avoid repeating Trump’s baseless election claims about fraud, they have perpetuated the idea that Democrats cheated by distorting Pennsylvania’s election laws and the actions of courts and election officials leading up to last year’s election.
Critics inside the Senate Republican caucus have suggested that people who want the “forensic investigation” are only interested in seeing Trump reinstated.
Election administrators say an audit is duplicative, given the required audits already carried out by counties and the state.
Meanwhile, Trump’s false claims of a stolen election have been debunked by the courts, his own Justice Department and numerous recounts, and no prosecutor, judge or election official in Pennsylvania has raised a concern about widespread fraud.