The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday said Fulton County had blatantly defied the court when it allowed a third-party company to access its 2020 voting machines.

The county had first given a firm access to its Dominion voting machines in the weeks after the 2020 election, prompting the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, to decertify the machines and ask the court to block the county from giving any further access. The court agreed, ordering the machines be kept secure.

Fulton County gave another company access to its voting machines anyway, leading the justices to impose sanctions on the county and its attorneys in the form of repaid legal fees for both the state and Dominion. “No remedy can undo the harm that the county’s contempt caused,” Justice David Wecht said in his majority opinion, but “simply are the next best thing.”

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The sanctions — and the at times clearly angry opinion — were also a message about the authority of the courts. ... In a concurring opinion, Justice Kevin Dougherty said “it is difficult to recall a more brazen abuse of the judicial process during my more than two decades on the bench” and used his opinion to explicitly lay out an additional message about elections in particular. The court was unanimous in agreeing on the sanctions. Wecht, a Democrat, was joined in his opinion by the other three Democrats, including Dougherty. The two Republicans on the court agreed with the outcome without joining the opinion.