Donald Trump won 86% of the vote in heavily Republican Fulton County, Pennsylvania in 2020. But that didn’t stop the county from pursuing evidence of inaccuracies in the election and allowing outside access to the data from voting machines. Now, the county’s taxpayers could be on the hook for almost a half million dollars for the county’s action.

Bruce Siwy is the Pennsylvania State Capital Bureau Reporter for the USA Today Network, wrote about the latest this week and was on The Spark Friday.

Soon after the 2020 election, the Fulton County Commissioners authorized a company to look at the county's voting machines to determine whether there was any fraud or inaccuracies. None were found but then Fulton County hired a second company to look at the machine's data and Siwy said that's where the country encountered trouble,"The real question at this point is why they had it looked at a second time after the first report came out and essentially why this is being done also without any authorization. And that's really what's gotten them in hot water at this point in time, because of their actions, they've been found in contempt of court by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court judge, who has a special master from the Commonwealth Court to oversee the cases now. And because of their actions, again, the legal fees incurred and other fees are incurred now by the Department of State in relation to this case are now coming back to Fulton County in a way that they will pay for this, whether they have some sort of insurance arrangement, whether it comes out of the taxpayer dollars, whether they're personally liable. I don't believe that's been fully determined yet. And the final bill itself has not yet been determined either. The invoices that were submitted by the Department of State to the special master with Commonwealth Court earlier this year were only through June. So that doesn't cover any of the proceedings that happened in August, most recently where they've argued about the escrow agent that would ultimately take possession of the voting machines that had been inspected. And so there really isn't a final tally of this yet." Those invoices total more than $448,000.

A third-party escrow agent has been appointed to take control of the voting machines as Siwy explained,"My understanding of the situation is that because the court had found the county in contempt for allowing unauthorized access, now multiple times, they want it in the hands of a third party. They want basically these machines away from the commissioners because they've now been found to not be operating in faith when they're told not to touch the machines or have them look that they're doing it anyway."

Siwy was asked what's next,"I think that it's fair to question whether the county at any point is going to challenge this. I think it's also fair to question at any point if once those machines are in a neutral facility, any agency would like to take a look at them, including to see if anything was done with these machines in particular. So, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if we hear more about this. The county has fought tooth and nail from from the outset to try to keep possession, to have them continually looked at."

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