By Nathan Layne
(Reuters) -The Pennsylvania Supreme Court appointed a special master on Friday to review allegations that officials in a rural county violated a court order by allowing a forensics company to examine their voting equipment in July, marking the county's second security breach of the machines.
Earlier this week, Pennsylvania's top election official filed a legal brief accusing officials in Fulton County of violating a Jan. 27 court injunction by giving access to voting machines to an unauthorized company, Speckin Forensics LLC.
The alleged security breach came to light last month when Fulton County sued election equipment maker Dominion Voting Systems, citing purported security flaws discovered in Speckin's analysis of six hard drives from the machines.
In a legal filing on Friday, the state Supreme Court said it appointed Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer to weigh the allegations of wrongdoing, including whether "the requested finding of contempt is civil or criminal in nature."
Cohn Jubelirer, who is the appellate court's president judge, is also tasked with developing an evidentiary record and producing a report with proposed findings of fact and recommendations for the high court by Nov. 18.
In a Pennsylvania Supreme Court filing on Tuesday, lawyers for the Secretary of the Commonwealth had asked the court to hold Fulton County officials, including Republican Commissioners Stuart Ulsh and Randy Bunch, in civil contempt for the breach.
The lawyers said county officials "openly thumbed their noses at a clear and direct order of this Court" by allowing Speckin, a Michigan-based company, access to the machines.
Neither Ulsh nor Bunch responded to a request for comment.
Stefanie Lambert, a Detroit-based attorney representing the county, did not immediately respond to a query about the special master appointment. Earlier on Friday, she pointed to alleged security flaws highlighted in Speckin's report and noted that the county has sued Dominion and no longer uses its machines.
The latest incident in Fulton, a solidly Republican county in south-central Pennsylvania, illustrates what some election-security experts describe as a growing insider threat from officials tasked with safeguarding the voting process.
Reuters has documented 24 incidents nationally since the 2020 election in which public officials and others are accused of breaching or attempting to breach election systems in an effort to uncover evidence to support former U.S. President Donald Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election.
Such violations can expose confidential voter information and enable election-tampering by revealing security protocols.
The equipment examined by Speckin Forensics was decertified by the state last year after a December 2020 inspection of the machines by another technology company, Wake Technology Services Inc. That inspection violated state election codes barring unauthorized access to voting equipment, the state said.
"Put simply, enough is enough. Petitioners have now twice breached the security of this voting system by turning its components over to unauthorized third parties," lawyers for the state wrote in their court filing on Tuesday.