Project 2025 agenda says former Pennsylvania secretary of state should be 'investigated and prosecuted' for 2020 election guidance

PHILADELPHIA — Project 2025, the controversial conservative agenda crafted by many former advisers to former President Donald Trump, says that the top election official in Pennsylvania “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” by the Justice Department for her guidance on provisional ballots during the 2020 election.

While the roughly 900-page policy agenda does not mention a specific name, it could only be referring to former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who served as the commonwealth’s top election official at the time.

The targeting of a specific election official in a critical battleground state likely to determine the outcome of the race in November serves as another attempt by Trump-aligned Republicans to stoke uncertainty in election processes. Trump lost Pennsylvania to Biden in 2020 and spent months pushing false claims of election fraud in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I’ve got news for them: Protecting the right of American citizens to exercise their fundamental right to vote is not a crime. In fact, it’s quite the opposite,” Boockvar said.

The Project 2025 agenda known formally as the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The project, published last year, is a proposed blueprint for a second Trump administration, which includes plans to fire civil servants, expand presidential powers, dismantle the Department of Education, and cease sales of the abortion pill, among other things.

Trump has disavowed Project 2025 amid the backlash to the document, despite the involvement of former Trump administration officials.

Boockvar believes that Project 2025′s messaging about Pennsylvania is a “further illustration of what we know to expect is going to be their playbook” for 2024.

“They’re going to, once again, file, throw everything at the wall to see what will stick, and they’ll do it in the courts, and they’ll do it on the street, and they’ll do it on the street that comes through on our phones, the public space on our web … and we have to remain vigilant,” Boockvar said.

The agenda’s main gripe with Pennsylvania elections seems to be around the state’s use of provisional ballots, which are given when the county’s elections officials need more time to assess a voter’s eligibility, according to the Department of State.

Project 2025 writes that in Pennsylvania law “no county may affirmatively provide provisional ballots: The mail-in voter must vote in person and sign a new affidavit.” The plan suggests curtailing federal civil rights enforcement and redirecting the DOJ to investigate alleged state-level voter registration fraud because of this, making it easier for officials, like Boockvar, to be prosecuted.

But the project’s claims about Pennsylvania law are not true, said Geoff Morrow, deputy communications director for the Department of State.

“Any accusation that the Department has used guidance to circumvent election law is false, and it is well past time to stop arguing over the audited, verified results of the 2020 election,” Morrow said Monday. “The plans outlined in Project 2025 are a clear attempt to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters.”

Provisional ballots can be provided for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, a voter reporting to the wrong precinct or being unable to show required ID.

Eligible Pennsylvania voters can also be issued a provisional ballot if they completed an absentee or mail-in ballot that was rejected, or is believed will be rejected. They could also receive a provisional if they unsuccessfully voted on an absentee or mail-in ballot and did not “surrender” their ballot and outer return envelope to their polling place.

After submitting a provisional ballot, the county board of elections will decide within seven days after the election whether the voter was eligible to cast their ballot at the election district where the voter used the provisional ballot. If it’s eligible, the vote will be counted.

Republicans have tried to muddy the waters surrounding general elections before. In 2020, the Trump campaign launched several lawsuits, based on unfounded information, in Pennsylvania, and other battleground states, in hopes of subverting results of the election. One lawsuit was aimed at stopping the certification of votes in Pennsylvania, alleging that Democratic voters were being treated more favorably than Republicans.