Seth Grove, R-Dover and interim Pennsylvania House State Government Committee majority chairman, said Tuesday that his committee will begin holding hearings on the process undertaken in the 2020 election.

“Regardless of outcomes it is incumbent upon the Legislature to ensure that Pennsylvania has free, fair and secure elections. Over the course of the past several weeks, Pennsylvania’s elections experienced a process failure because of undue and ill-conceived interference in our elections by the Pennsylvania Department of State and five Democrat justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. We need to investigate what transpired so we can develop a comprehensive legislative fix to ensure that the people of Pennsylvania can have faith in their future elections,” Grove said.

“That review must happen now, while all the evidence remains before us and the events leading up to our General Election are fresh in the minds of all participants.”

Rep. Kevin Boyle, D-Philadelphia and Democratic chairman of the House State Government Committee, quickly denounced House Republicans’ call for an investigative committee with subpoena power to audit the election process in Pennsylvania, particularly, Boyle said, when Republicans admit they have no evidence of any wrongdoing or impropriety.

Majority Leader Rep. Kerry Benninghoff and Rep. Greg Rothman speak about the 2020 election results and tabulation process in Pennsylvania.

“If you want to ensure that the election process here in Pennsylvania is fair and free, you can start by not sowing doubt and discord without evidence of any wrongdoing,” Boyle said. “But free and fair elections aren’t conducted on the whim of the president. Regardless of who is leading at any given moment, in free and fair elections every single vote cast in accordance with our laws, on or before Election Day, gets counted. And that is exactly what happened in Pennsylvania. Just because Donald Trump or the GOP doesn’t like the result, it doesn’t give them carte blanche to change the rules or create workarounds to get their own way.”

On Tuesday, House Republicans held a news conference where Rep. Dawn Keefer, who represents parts of York and Cumberland counties, called for the creation of a committee with subpoena power to investigate the election process in Pennsylvania.

“Faith in government begins with faith in the elections which select that government,” Keefer said. But, Boyle questioned, “How can the American people, the people of Pennsylvania, have confidence in a system when they see their elected leaders calling the process into question before it even starts?

Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre/Mifflin, supported the effort and agreed that the committee’s work should begin immediately.

“A thorough review of this year’s election process is necessary. Having safe and secure elections with reliable results should not be a Republican or Democrat issue. That is why we are using the bipartisan standing committee structure to handle this legislative function,” Benninghoff said. “The time for reviewing the 2020 election is now, while the incidents and concerns of the election are before us, to guarantee that future elections are conducted with the integrity and confidence Pennsylvanians and Americans deserve.”

The partisan posturing comes at a time when some Pennsylvania counties were still slogging through record numbers of time-consuming provisional ballots Tuesday — many of them cast by voters who ordered a mail-in ballot but never received it, preferred to vote in person on Election Day or were worried that it would not be counted even after they’d mailed it.

Other counties had yet to count military and overseas ballots, which were still arriving up until Tuesday’s deadline, as well as ballots that arrived by mail after Nov. 3 — Election Day — but before the court-ordered deadline of 5 p.m. last Friday. York, Bucks and Chester counties were unable to finish sorting out a combined figure of more than 16,000 provisional, county officials said.

About 10,000 mail-in ballots were received by counties in the three days after polls closed — ballots that are the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court challenge by Republicans — while counties issued about 94,000 provisional ballots to voters, although the department didn’t say how many have been counted.

Biden held an approximately 48,000-vote margin Tuesday night, too wide a gap to qualify for a mandatory statewide recount.

Pennsylvania’s voting rules provide several avenues to challenge results, none of them simple, and the short time frames involved require motivated supporters, clockwork organization and ample funding.

Voters who want a recount in their precinct can contact their county election boards in groups of at least three, producing affidavits that allege fraud or error. County election boards must resolve such claims before they issue certified counts, due Nov. 23.

There are about 9,100 precincts across the state.

Once a county declares it has finished its count — a date that will vary — a five-day period starts, during which groups of at least three voters in a precinct can assert claims of fraud or error before their county’s common pleas court. In each precinct, that requires the three voters put up $50 each.

The county judge would oversee any such recount.

A wider challenge that would seek to have the statewide results thrown out on grounds that the election was somehow illegal would have to be filed by Nov. 23 in state Commonwealth Court.

At least 100 voters would have to sign on, including five who have signed affidavits about why they think the election was illegal, or that there was something wrong with the voting or counting.

That process requires a bond to be posted. When Green Party candidate Jill Stein went that route four years ago, the bond was set at $1 million. She subsequently withdrew her challenge.

“It seems the attempt to sow discord in our elections is very deliberate and was premeditated,” Boyle said. “Consider that I and many of my Democratic colleagues pleaded with the Republicans who control the House and Senate to allow the preparation or pre-canvassing of mail-in and absentee ballots prior to Election Day, so that the election results could be known earlier. But the Republican leadership refused to allow that to happen. And then, when the results of the election took time to tally, Republican leadership like Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff tried to manipulate the public by saying in a tweet that it was a failure by Democrats. That is quite simply a lie. We did everything in our power to get counties the additional time they needed. The Republican majority initially offered 21 days in H.B. 2626, before they themselves amended the bill and took that vital pre-canvassing time away from counties. Their failure to act has engineered this crisis.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.