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The Bulwark: four people voted from Scott Presler’s Beaver County house in 2024

Scott Presler has spent two years saying Pennsylvania's voter rolls are full of people who don't live where they vote. The Bulwark's review of registration records found four people using his own Beaver County house as their voting address in 2024: Presler, and three others outside his family, including a consultant who voted in Florida in 2020 and again in April 2025 and a right-wing social media figure from Oklahoma. State law requires a voter to live in the district 30 days before an election, and its election code says coming "for temporary purposes only" does not create residency. Early Vote Action, Presler's PAC, confirmed the address was used and said the people have since moved out of state. It is the second Bulwark story this month on Presler's operation.

Sources: The Bulwark, Oct. 23, 2026; Pennsylvania Election Code, sections 702 and 704.

Photo: New York State Young Republicans / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Archbald council votes 7-0 to deny the Wildcat Ridge data center campus

Archbald Borough Council voted 7-0 to deny the Wildcat Ridge data center campus in Lackawanna County after nine hearings and a year of fighting. The packed gym erupted.

Cornell Realty Management wanted 14 data centers on the mountainside above Business Route 6. Its attorney, Edmund Campbell, told council the project met the standards under the ordinance and asked for approval anyway. He was booed.

Opponents expect an appeal.

Sources: PennLive, WVIA, Times-Tribune.

Photo: Mr. Matté / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Pennsylvania warns doctors about measles in pregnancy after 66 women are infected

Pennsylvania's measles outbreak is at 1,286 cases in 42 counties, and 66 pregnant women are among the infected. Doctors have reported at least six babies born with congenital measles, two of them sick enough with pneumonia to need intensive care, according to NBC News. How many of those pregnancies ended badly is something the state won't say, because Pennsylvania law bars the disclosure of pregnancy outcomes. On Monday the Department of Health sent clinicians new guidance: a pregnant woman without immunity who is exposed to measles has six days to receive immunoglobulin. The MMR vaccine can't be given during pregnancy, though it's safe after delivery and while breastfeeding. Vaccination before pregnancy remains the only real protection.

Sources: International Business Times, Pennsylvania Department of Health, NBC News

Image: CDC on Unsplash

Spotlight PA’s district-by-district guide to Pa.’s 17 congressional races

Spotlight PA has a district-by-district guide to all 17 of Pennsylvania’s congressional races, and it starts with the one Bucks County votes in. PA-01 covers Bucks and part of Montgomery County, has a narrow Republican registration edge, voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and is rated Likely Republican by the Cook Political Report. Bob Harvie, a county commissioner since 2020 and a Falls Township supervisor before that, is the Democrat. Brian Fitzpatrick, first elected in 2016 after serving as a federal prosecutor and FBI agent, is the Republican incumbent. Three of the state’s districts are Cook toss-ups this year: the 7th, 8th and 10th. Ours is not one of them.

Sources: Spotlight PA, Cook Political Report

Photo: Thomas Hatzenbuhler / Architect of the Capitol

Three legal experts on the ‘FBI files’ Brian Fitzpatrick keeps demanding

Brian Fitzpatrick's campaign tells voters that Bob Harvie is under FBI investigation, and Fitzpatrick says he will not debate him until the commissioner releases "files" from that probe. Harvie testified as a witness before a federal grand jury in 2022, in an investigation into political donations and union contracts tied to the Pennsbury School District. No charges were filed. Three Pennsylvania legal experts told The Inquirer it is highly unlikely Harvie has the documents. Lauren Ouziel, a former federal prosecutor now at Temple, said records would not leave government channels without an indictment. Stanley Brand called the attack "all smoke and mirrors."

Sources: The Philadelphia Inquirer

Photos: William Thomas Cain and Bastiaan Slabbers / The Inquirer

The Beacon’s case: Fitzpatrick has quietly gone full Trump

Kierstyn Zolfo's column at the Bucks County Beacon does what most PA-01 coverage won't. She takes the "moderate" label seriously and checks it against the record: a press list that cut Levittown Now off for years, a campaign aide whose social posts The Bulwark quoted at length and who was a guest at Fitzpatrick's wedding, and ads that passed off self-published Patch articles as news.

Bob Harvie's defamation suit against the Defending America PAC is still live, and it's about the same habit: ads claiming he was under FBI investigation.

The section headings do the arguing for her. The media. The bigotry. The lies. Every accusation is an admission.

One of those sections points back at us. We published photos earlier this year of a Fitzpatrick campaign staffer tampering with Harvie's campaign signs, and Zolfo sets that beside three other episodes from Fitzpatrick campaigns going back to 2018.

She ends with four words. We deserve better.

Read it at the Beacon: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick Has (Quietly) Gone Full Trump

Image: Bucks County Beacon

Presler’s super PAC paid two convicted felons to run GOTV in Pennsylvania

Two of the regional coordinators running get-out-the-vote work for Scott Presler's super PAC in Pennsylvania are convicted felons. The Bulwark published the receipts Friday.

Brandon Matlack runs the Lehigh Valley for Early Vote Action, the PAC Presler started in 2023, and FEC filings show it has paid him $71,992 across 47 payments since October 2024, every one logged as "GOTV consulting." The Bulwark matched his address and date of birth to Lehigh County court records for a Bethlehem man who pleaded guilty to felony strangulation in 2022 and was still on probation when the payments started. Five years before that he'd been accused of shooting a friend with an AK-47-style rifle. He pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment and possession of an instrument of a crime. In 2016, state police said, he zip-tied his father and demanded $4,000.

Julie DeVuono has taken $35,774 from the same PAC since March 2025. She's the Amityville, New York nurse practitioner who pleaded guilty in 2023 to forging COVID-19 vaccination cards, laundering the money and writing false opioid prescriptions, a scheme prosecutors put at $1.5 million. She forfeited more than $1.2 million and got probation. Her X bio reads "Justified Felon."

Presler spent most of October accusing Janelle Stelson, the Democrat running against Rep. Scott Perry, of employing a canvasser arrested for indecent exposure. Homeland Security repeated it in a press release. Stelson says the man was neither an employee nor a volunteer. Her campaign's filings don't list him, and Axios found no record of him in the volunteer database.

He was making that accusation with this payroll on the books.

Sen. John Cornyn called Presler a "grifter" earlier this year, after Presler backed Ken Paxton in the Texas primary. Presler, Early Vote Action, Matlack and DeVuono didn't answer The Bulwark's questions.

Sources: The Bulwark, Oct. 16, 2026; FEC, Early Vote Action PAC disbursements; Suffolk County District Attorney; Lehigh Valley Live.

Photo: New York State Young Republicans / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Harvie tells NBC: Fitzpatrick ‘is no moderate’

Bob Harvie got eight minutes on Meet the Press NOW Thursday and spent most of them trying to peel the moderate label off Brian Fitzpatrick.

"He is no moderate," he told Kristen Welker. Before that she'd played a Fitzpatrick ad. "I've called out both parties when they're wrong," the congressman says in it.

Then Harvie went through the votes: cutting the ACA tax credits, gutting SNAP and Medicaid, the war in Iran, against releasing the Epstein files, for the tariffs. Fitzpatrick, he said, is "singing the same song he's always singing, which is, don't pay attention to what I do in Washington. Just listen to what I say."

NBC has the full segment.

Sources: NBC News, Meet the Press NOW, Oct. 15, 2026.

Eight PA-01 campaign claims, checked

Eight claims in the PA-01 race, fact-checked. The ones at the center of Fitzpatrick's most-run ads do not survive it.

It found no evidence Bob Harvie is or ever was the subject of an FBI investigation, which is the spine of the Fitzpatrick campaign's most prominent attack ad. The Falls Township probe behind that claim is over, the statute of limitations has run, and Harvie's grand jury appearance was as a witness. His lawyers have sued the super PAC behind similar ads for defamation.

A quote that has Harvie calling himself a king traces to a self-published Patch post by a Fitzpatrick associate, with no sourcing. And the ad claiming Harvie cast the “lone vote” to cut police funding is misleading: he voted against one $43,000 equipment purchase in 2024, then voted for other sheriff's department requests, including about $31,000 for a deputy vehicle and $44,000 for an interceptor.

Read it in full at the link below.

Source: USA TODAY (Bucks County Courier Times fact-check, original at phillyburbs.com)

Photo: James Buckley

Perkasie man charged with threatening to kill Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick over his health coverage

A Perkasie man is charged with threatening to kill U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in emails that demanded $6,000 for his medication.

Aaron Michael McComsey, 44, was arrested Thursday and charged by indictment with two counts of threatening to assault, murder or kidnap a federal official, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia announced.

Prosecutors say the emails went to Fitzpatrick's office over two days in August, starting around Aug. 4. In one, McComsey wrote: "Aetna dropped me. Medicare doesn't cover drugs. And medicaid is refusing to pay. I go into withdrawal in 36 hours. After that time, [the official] is no more on this earth. Fix this or he goes bye bye forever." Another read: "Just tell [the official] I want 6000 dollars for this month's medication costs. He's a millionaire. Let his ass pay for it. I'm so done. That man is finished."

The indictment identifies the congressman only as "B.F." Fitzpatrick, a Republican, represents the district where McComsey lives. The Inquirer reported Thursday, citing a source familiar with the investigation, that B.F. is Fitzpatrick. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated the case, with help from the Bucks County district attorney's office.

McComsey faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted. The U.S. Attorney's Office noted in its announcement that the charges are accusations and that every defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

Sources: U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Oct. 15, 2026; The Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 15, 2026; Bucks County Courier Times, Oct. 15, 2026.

Photo: U.S. House Office of Photography