In a legal filing that exposes the depth of the fracture that exists within the Bucks County Republican Committee, dozens of members say Bucks GOP leaders acted unethically in an effort to fend off a 2022 power play by its more-conservative faction.
Filed July 31 in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas, “Barry R Casper vs. Bucks County Republican Committee” seeks in excess of $50,000 in damages and the nullification of the June 25, 2022 internal re-election of chairwoman Patricia Poprik and her preferred slate of officers — vice-chairman Joseph A. Cullen Jr., secretary Joseph Pizzo, treasurer David R. Breidinger, and assistant secretary/treasurer Colleen Strunk.
All are listed as defendants in the filing made by Casper, the Hilltown committeeman who opposed Poprik in the 2022 race for the chairmanship. Casper’s co-plaintiffs number about 50 and represent many of the committee’s more-conservative members.
“We have engaged an attorney, but this complaint appears to be entirely meritless, and it will be rigorously defended,” Poprik said Monday in a statement issued by the Bucks GOP.
That attorney is Joel L. Frank, managing partner of West Chester-based Lamb McErlane PC. He could not be reached for comment Monday.
Absent from the plaintiff list is Holland resident Andy Meehan, president and founder of the RightForBucks organization, who has publicly feuded with Poprik over the direction of the party.
Still, many of the claims in the newly filed lawsuit mirror those that Meehan pushed in a “Special Report” by RightForBucks in early January. Like the lawsuit, that report largely used an ethics complaint Casper lodged with the Bucks GOP on Jan. 9 of this year as the basis for its accusations.
Both the lawsuit and the ethics complaint say Poprik improperly used voice votes instead of secret ballots during the Jan. 25, 2022 internal election; that she appointed a number of committee members in the run-up to that election and then allowed them to vote; and that the committee leadership did not follow guidelines for accepting proxy votes. The suit argues that had those proxy votes been excluded, Casper would have succeeded in wresting the chairmanship from Poprik.
“The large, growing and well-organized conservative base of the committee will no longer tolerate this corruption, nor will thousands of disenfranchised Bucks County voters,” Casper told PAGOP state chairman Lawrence Tabas in the cover letter of the state’s copy of the ethics complaint.
The state organization received a copy — and is named as a defendant in the lawsuit as well — because it is tasked with ensuring the county parties’ bylaws adhere to the state parties’ bylaws and that they are followed in the normal course of business.
The ethics complaint accuses Poprik of “stacking the committee voter rolls with her own un-elected appointees right before her own re-election bid.
“The Bucks County Committee members should not permit the top executive to add appointed electors to the voter roll in advance of his/her own elections,” the ethics complaint argues. “This effectively cancels out the votes of the duly elected committee members.”
All three, the suit and ethics complaint argue, violate the committee’s bylaws, which they claim were “defective” anyway because they did not have a “wet” signature and were clearly produced using a word processor despite being dated in 1972, seven years before such technology was commercially available.
Those bylaws, the suit claims, appear to have been secretly replaced by a signed copy in January of this year, said Andrew Teitelman, Casper’s Lower Moreland-based attorney, who added he believed that swap was made illegally.
“Something wrong happened there with the removal of the word processed version,” Teitelman said Monday. “But the point is that there were no bylaws validly effective in June of 2022.”
As for Casper’s ethics complaint, Teitelman said, the Bucks GOP never responded to it.
“This is the remedy for that,” Teitelman said, referring to the filing of the July 31 lawsuit.
The ball is now in the defendants’ court to file preliminary objections, bring up new matters or level counter-charges.
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