Lehigh Valley lawyer faces hefty sanctions over voting machine audits in Fulton County, Pa.
Thomas Carroll, two Fulton officials were found to be in contempt of court
A Lehigh Valley lawyer is part of a group that should be assessed $750,000 for violating a court order prohibiting third-party access to Pennsylvania’s Fulton County voting machines after the 2020 election, a Commonwealth Court judge ruled Friday.
Thomas J. Carroll, a former assistant district attorney for Northampton County, Commissioner Randy Bunch and now-former Commissioner Stuart Ulsh were found to be in contempt of court in April 2023 for violating a temporary injunction issued by the state Supreme Court.
Carroll, a Republican from Bethlehem with a private practice in Pottstown, has been the lead attorney in Fulton’s protracted efforts to see whether voting machines fraudulently benefited Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Former President Donald Trump won the rural county of 14,500 people with more than 85% of the vote.
As part of the contempt order, Carroll, Ulsh and Bunch must pay legal fees and costs incurred by the state and Dominion Voting Systems over the matter. The Supreme Court also ordered that Fulton’s Dominion machines be decommissioned and turned over to a neutral third party.
On Aug. 30, Commonwealth Court President Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer, acting as a special master in the case, issued an order that recommended fees and costs – based on submitted documentation – for approval by the Supreme Court.
Besides the $750,000 in legal fees to be jointly paid, the order said the county and its officials are responsible for an additional $285,700. That amount is considered to be the state’s and Dominion’s court expenses before Carroll was hired, from Dec. 17, 2021, until April 12, 2022. The costs for Carrol and the county go from April 13, 2022, through Jan. 31, 2024.
Carroll has been working in tandem with Michigan lawyer Stefanie Lambert, who was enlisted by Fulton on the same date as Carroll. The two replaced a legal team led by Thomas King, a prominent Republican in Pennsylvania, by a 2-1 vote by Fulton commissioners on April 12, 2022. Republicans Bunch and Ulsh voted in favor of the hires while Democrat Paula Shives, now a former commissioner, opposed them.
While Fulton said it is not paying for their legal representation, the county has remained silent about who is funding Carroll and Lambert.
Lambert, a nationally known figure in Republican-led efforts to audit 2020 voting results, faces felony charges in Michigan for allegedly helping to coordinate a plan to gain access to voting tabulators.
Lambert and another Lehigh Valley Republican – Bill Bachenberg, co-owner of Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays – were accused in a civil lawsuit connected to Fulton County of failing to pay for an audit of the voting machines in June 2022 after results showed no evidence of fraud.
The lawsuit by XR Vision, filed in federal court in Michigan in July 2023, said it was hired to audit the voting machines but did not get paid for its work. The lawsuit alleged that Bachenberg agreed to pay for attorney fees and expenses in various election fraud investigations and lawsuits and provided a $1 million line of credit to Lambert’s law firm. Bachenberg and Lambert have denied the allegations. A trial is scheduled for January 2025.
Carroll and Bachenberg, serving as chair, were among the “alternate” electors to the Pennsylvania Electoral College, signing a document on Dec. 14, 2020, pledging their votes to Trump had he prevailed in his lawsuits claiming he, not Biden, had won the state.
Carroll, who is chair of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in July. Bachenberg has been named to Trump’s Electoral College slate should the former president prevail on Nov. 5.
Bunch, who has a mural of Trump painted on his McConnellsburg garage, was reelected to office in November and is chairman of the board of commissioners. Ulsh lost his reelection bid in the 2023 Republican primary.
Carroll, Ulsh and Bunch could not be reached for comment, but they have previously defended their actions, saying they have a duty to keep elections fair.
Fulton County plans to appeal the Aug. 30 order and officials will make no comment, according to an email sent to Armchair Lehigh Valley from Stacey M. Shives, Fulton’s chief clerk and right-to know officer.
The Trump effect
Fulton’s efforts to look for fraud in Dominion machines mirror those that took place in other states, including Arizona and Georgia, after Trump claimed the election was rigged.
One disproven theory, among others promoted by Fox News, said votes were switched from Biden to Trump. Dominion sued Fox News for pushing a false narrative, and the network settled the lawsuit by paying Dominion $787 million as the trial was set to begin in April 2023.
Dominion machines were used in 14 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties in the 2020 election. Fulton County, in effect, became a Republican test case for Dominion machines. (Lehigh and Northampton counties do not use Dominion machines.)
Dominion has refuted what it called “the baseless and false claims about the integrity of the election system or accuracy of the results in Pennsylvania” in a website titled “Setting the Record Straight: Facts & Rumors.”
“Despite numerous election security experts and U.S. Attorney General William Barr affirming there is no evidence of widespread fraud in this election, disinformation persists. Pennsylvania certified its election results on November 24 (2020). Certified election results in the state validate the accuracy of the machines and their official tallies,” the website states.
Bunch and Carroll did not respond to emails and/or telephone calls requesting comment. A person who said he was named Stuart L. Ulsh and was a former commissioner hung up the telephone when pressed to talk about Fulton County and lawsuits. The three of them, however, have discussed the ongoing litigation publicly.
All three have said the county has a legal duty to make sure elections are fair with Bunch and Ulsh saying their continued pursuit was done for transparency and ultimately found issues with Dominion Voting Systems machines.
“Voting is a constitutional right, and we will continue to ensure that election vendors do not interfere with casting your vote in Fulton County,” a press release on the county website states.
In a breach of contract lawsuit against Dominion, the county alleged the voting machines had “malicious python script” and were “communicating internationally with Canada.”
“That evidence alone says that Dominion voting machines were corrupted across the nation,” Carroll told the crowd at a Lehigh Valley Tea Party meeting in September 2023, which is available on the group’s YouTube channel.
“Those very brave county commissioners of Fulton County, Pennsylvania, deserve our thanks because they revealed the truth. And now they're under attack, and the lawyers that have filed are under attack as well,” said Carroll, who has served as chair of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party.
Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council concluded, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Additionally, the MITRE Corp., a nonprofit data analysis firm, examined 2020 election results and determined, “We did not find any support from the data of widespread vote manipulations by Dominion machines in the eight key states we examined.”
Tangle of lawsuits
Fulton’s quest to audit Dominion machines has led to a tangle of lawsuits with the state suing the county and the county suing the state.
Dominion has filed a breach of contract suit against Fulton with Fulton filing one against the company. A federal court in April threw out Fulton’s complaint.
On April 19, 2023, the Supreme Court said Carroll, Bunch and Ulsh violated a temporary injunction it issued in January 2022 that halted third-party inspections of the voting machines until the legalities over who – a county or the state – has final say over voting machines could be heard. That case is pending.
“Our close review makes clear that Fulton County willfully violated an order of this Court. As well, we find that Fulton County and its various attorneys have engaged in a sustained, deliberate pattern of dilatory, obdurate, and vexatious conduct and have acted in bad faith throughout these sanction proceedings. Taken as a whole, this behavior prompts us to sanction both the County and Attorney Carroll,” state Supreme Court Justice David Wecht wrote in the April 2023 opinion.
Wecht’s opinion gives considerable space outlining what he called “serial interruptions, delays, and even what can only be described as defiance.”
In one example about Carroll’s alleged actions, he wrote:
“First, he insisted that {the evidentiary hearing} be delayed until November 9 to make room for his own vacation. Then, on the eve of that hearing, he contended that Commissioner Ulsh would be unable to attend the hearings due to his departure for vacation on November 8, which was Election Day.”
Court records show Fulton hired Wake TSI, a cyber security company that was involved in a hand-count of votes in Arizona to prove fraud in 2020, to audit its Dominion machines in December 2020. Wake TSI filed a report on Feb. 19, 2021.
The Department of State didn’t hear about the inspection until July 2021. It then issued a directive to all counties prohibiting unauthorized post-election inspections, court records show. The state said Wake TSI was not authorized to inspect the machines.
The Department of State also sent Fulton a letter on July 20, 2021, saying it had to decommission the Dominion machines because they had been compromised by Wake’s inspection. That action led Fulton to sue the state.
In December 2021, the state learned that Fulton was planning to give voting-machine access to Envoy Sage, LLC, a digital forensics company, court records show. The state went to court and, after being denied an injunction in Commonwealth Court, obtained a temporary one on Jan. 27, 2022, from the Supreme Court. The Envoy audit never took place.
Seven months after the injunction, court records show, Fulton engaged Speckin Forensics to do an unauthorized inspection July 13-14, 2022. Ulsh and Bunch were present, court records show.
It’s possible that another inspection took place as well. In its suit against Lambert and Bachenberg, XR Vision said it conducted an inspection and submitted a final report showing no fraud on or about June 22, 2022. Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt referenced the lawsuit in a footnote on his Feb. 16 submission of expenses for the contempt case.
On Oct. 18, 2022, Schmidt filed a sanctions application with the Supreme Court, which turned the matter over to Cohn Jubelirer for review as a special master.
In her initial review, Cohn Jubelirer didn’t recommend Carroll for sanctions. Wecht added him in April 2023, saying, “It is difficult to believe that Attorney Carroll was ignorant of the events preceding and culminating in the Speckin inspection.”
In her breakdown Cohn Jubelirer said Carroll is jointly and severally liable for $472,255 in fees and $89,698 to the Commonwealth Secretary and $188,262 to Dominion.
Fulton is fully liable for $128,272 to the Secretary and $136,407 to Dominion, covering the period of Dec. 17, 2021, to Jan. 31, 2024.
While Wecht said Lambert had been involved in efforts to audit voting machines in Fulton, the justice said she could not be sanctioned because she was not officially listed as an attorney of record.