David Thornburgh, President and CEO of The Committee of Seventy.
Preserving Democracy: Time for Truth about Pennsylvania’s 2020 Presidential Election.
Pennsylvania’s historic election-reform law, which took effect on October 31, 2019, authorized no-excuse, mail-in voting and passed both houses of the legislature with strong bipartisan support. Originally driven principally by a desire to facilitate citizen-participation in elections, mail-in voting assumed new significance with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. However, months before the 2020 election took place, then-President Trump launched unsupported attacks against mail-in voting and asserted that he could only lose if there was widespread fraud. After the election, then-President Trump and his allies, including some elected officials from Pennsylvania, unsuccessfully sought to overturn the results of our election in every available forum, including the courts and the Congressional session that was interrupted for several hours by the January 6 riot in the Capitol.
David Thornburgh is the President and CEO of The Committee of Seventy, a non-partisan organization that was founded in Philadelphia in 1904 and is one of the country’s oldest good government groups. Its mission emphasizes strengthening democracy and protecting and improving the voting process in Pennsylvania. Mr. Thornburgh is considered by many to be Pennsylvania’s leading expert on elections. He was involved in the passage of the 2019 election-reform law, was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Election Security empaneled by the Pitt Cyber Institute, chaired the Pennsylvania Redistricting Reform Commission, and is the founder of Draw the Lines. He will discuss the issues surrounding an election that has been relentlessly attacked as fraudulent by some but that most have concluded was free and fair.
The Governing in Crisis lecture series is sponsored by the Institute of Politics and The Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy.
This interview is co-sponsored by The Committee of Seventy, The League of Women Voters, Pitt Law, Pitt Cyber, and Pitt Honors.
