Of the numerous witnesses who testified at a Pennsylvania Senate committee hearing on Wednesday on election fraud and election process breakdowns in the state during the 2020 General Election, none may have been more captivating than a Philadelphia woman, Olivia Jane Winters.
During her testimony, Winters spelled out several concerning events that, if true, can easily call into question the validity and fairness of the 2020 Pennsylvania Presidential election. Those events include her getting harassed by fellow poll workers, electioneering inside the polling location, and even suspected double voting.
Winters appeared via Zoom before the Senate Majority Policy committee made up of all Republicans. This hearing was held on Wednesday from the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg and was chaired by Schuylkill County Sen. Dave Argall and organized by Sen. Doug Mastriano.
While the hearing was designed to look at potential future fixes to the election process in Pennsylvania, it did so by recapping what happened starting a few days before Nov. 3.
Philadelphia Democrat Details Harassment Inside Polling Location, Suspected Double Voting
Winters described herself to the Committee as a registered Democrat who agreed to work as a Minority Inspector in Philadelphia at precinct location 36-15. She said her mother works as a “ward leader” in another part of the city but agreed to work on Election Day purely to help out her mother.
“I was just doing this purely to help my mom out,” she told the committee. “I don’t care who wins. I care that it’s a fair election.”
Winters told the committee that she arrived at the polling location at 6:30 a.m. on Election Day.
And pretty much from the get-go, she started having a bad day in her role as Minority Inspector.
Here are the incidents she told the Pennsylvania Senate Committee about during their hearing earlier this week:
Electioneering
Trouble began, Winters said, before the polls even opened. It sounds like the poll workers at this particular precinct weren’t appreciating the help she was supposed to provide.
“Immediately, I was met with a hostile attitude from all of the people I had to work with,” Winter said.
She listed the people at the precinct who gave her trouble from the outset: the Majority Inspector, the Poll Watcher, the machine operator and a “committeeman who was electioneering in the polls.”
Electioneering, or showing any sign of favoritism to a particular candidate or political party, is absolutely forbidden, even among voters appearing in person.
“He was wearing shirts and a hat and a mask for who to vote for,” she said.
Mail-in Ballot Procedure Questioned
Winter said about 90 minutes into the day after the polls had opened in Pennsylvania, Winters told the committee
“We must have had 60 people in line, in the building, snaking around the building,” she said.
That’s when a woman came to Winters and a clerk working for her and said she had a mail-in ballot she wanted to surrender, or voided, so she could vote in person.
The clerk working for Winters on Election Day instructed the voter that she’d have to fill out a form to formally get rid of her mail-in ballot and then have it signed by the precinct’s Judge of Elections.
Problem was, the Judge of Elections wasn’t there.
“She had decided to go home,” Winters told the committee. “She was not in the polling place for over 45 minutes.”
As they looked for the Judge to sign this voter’s ballot surrender form, the electioneering committeeman got confrontational with Winters and her clerk. He argued that the Judge didn’t need to sign the form and that anyone could sign it.
She said the committeeman “got in my face” and was “cursing” and yelled, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you stop trying to cause problems? Why don’t you shut up?”
Winters said she and her clerk pushed back. The two waited for the Judge of Elections to turn back up at the precinct and had her sign the voter’s affidavit that they were surrendering their ballot.
But that wasn’t before the Majority Inspector got involved in the row. Winters said the Majority Inspector threatened to slap her in the face and said the situation was going to become a “racial issue” if she didn’t get in line with the other poll workers.
“I’m not sure why it would be a racial issue. It has nothing to do with race,” she said. “I felt threatened.”
Winters said she decided to go above the precinct leaders where she was and made some phone calls higher up on the pecking order, including the District Attorney.
Double Votes: “We were not doing it correctly.”
After all that drama, there was some down time at the precinct so Winters said the Majority Inspector decided to vote. When they looked up the Majority Inspector’s name in the voter book, it indicated that they were supposed to turn in their unreturned mail-in ballot. Voter books in Pennsylvania were marked this way if a voter received a mail-in ballot but didn’t return it, meaning they technically were still in possession of it.
When Winters told the Majority Inspector this, they caused a stink inside the polling location.
Winters said the Majority Inspector told her that the ballot was thrown in the trash. So Winters told the Majority Inspector they’d have to vote with a Provisional ballot. And that didn’t go over well with the Majority Inspector and several other troublemakers inside that precinct.
She said the machine operator and committeeman once again got in her face and “told me I didn’t belong there, that I needed to shut up” and then began hurling expletives at her. The two who confronted Winters said they were going to allow the Majority Inspector to vote with a regular, not Provisional ballot.
“They told me I need to be quiet about it and then they let her go into the polls and vote,” Winters told the committee. “Who knows? Maybe she voted twice.”
When the Majority Inspector finally voted, allegedly illegally, is when the previous encounter took another turn. Several people representing the City of Philadelphia showed up at the polling place to attempt to clear up any confusion, but that only made it worse. The committeeman who she said harassed her earlier then “got his cousin involved” in this dispute. She said this all led to Winters testifying in Philadelphia on Election Day about what had happened. And then and only then, did a Deputy Sheriff show up at this particular precinct to show poll workers there the proper procedure for handling mail-in ballots and provisional ballots.
“Until then, we were not doing it correctly,” Winters testified on Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone actually knew how to receive a mail-in ballot. You could easily do both (vote twice). It happened in front of me. My Majority Inspector voted and then went into the polls and voted again.”
Watch Winters’ full testimony before the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee hearing this week via Right Side Broadcasting Network:
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