HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A growing movement is taking aim at flaws in Pennsylvania's vote-by-mail law. The problem is, it's happening in the courts, not the Legislature.
If the November election is as close as expected, the most populous presidential battleground states could become hotbeds of challenges and conspiracy theories.
The state is also hosting an election for a Democratic senator. Bob Casey Republican challenger David McCormick The move will determine control of Congress but also bring increased scrutiny of elections offices if lawmakers are unable to break partisan deadlock and mail-in ballots slow the vote count.
“In Pennsylvania, the biggest battleground state in the country, everyone realizes how important the election results are,” said Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the Philadelphia-based good government group Committee of Seventy.
The political impasse over Pennsylvania's election law dates back to 2019, when the Republican-controlled Legislature reached a compromise with then-Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf to significantly expand voting by mail.
A few months later, then-President Donald Trump, without any evidence, Demonizing mail-in voting He has taken contradictory positions this year, alleging widespread fraud and sparking opposition from Republicans who then withdrew their support. Promoting postal voting Also, Support the lawsuit I am against it.
Attacks on mail-in voting have spawned partisan fighting in Pennsylvania over attempts to fix it.
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Democrats also want to restore the convenience of early voting that most states already have, something Republicans can't achieve. Unlike other states, Pennsylvania voters can't change election law because the state constitution doesn't allow residents to write their own ballots.
As a result, a flurry of election-related lawsuits have been filed in state, federal and county courts, most of which target mail-in voting.
Nationally, Republicans are trying more than ever to win over voters. Vote by mailIt's a surprising shift for a party that has sought to exaggerate conspiracy theories about postal voting. Trump's 2020 defeat.
Still, mail-in voting remains largely the province of Democrats: In Pennsylvania, roughly three-quarters of mail-in ballots tend to be cast by Democrats.
One of the most significant proposed changes to the state's vote-by-mail law is one sought by counties: It would allow local elections offices to start processing mail-in ballots before Election Day, as is allowed in nearly every other vote-by-mail state, allowing for faster results on election night.
Democrats have also sought to resolve a firestorm of lawsuits by clarifying the law to allow mail-in ballots that don't have a handwritten date, signature or secrecy envelope to be counted. Democratic-leaning counties typically help voters correct errors so their ballots can be counted, but thousands of those ballots are discarded.
Without changes to state laws, Democrats expect chaos surrounding the 2020 election to repeat in November.
Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Sharif Street said the state has the ability to hold a fair and properly administered election under current laws, but he said Trump and his allies have no interest in that.
“He doesn't want a smooth election process in Pennsylvania or anywhere because he thinks chaos before the election is to his advantage because he can rally people together by saying 'there will be a steal' and then after the election he can point to fraud and say he's the rightful winner when in fact he lost,” Street said.
Trump has sowed doubts Trump has been voicing concerns about this year's election for months, and at a rally last weekend said only widespread fraud could prevent him from winning reelection. “The only way they're going to beat us is by cheating,” he told supporters in Las Vegas.
Unfounded allegations of fraud filled the void during the drawn-out vote count after Pennsylvania's 2020 election.
Charlie Gerow, a longtime Republican activist and strategist in Pennsylvania, said Republicans are prepared to report and document fraud that they didn't expect in this year's election. To be clear, voter fraud is extremely rare, usually just a few votes and involves Republican voters. Another vote for Trump.
Ann Associated Press investigation A 2021 investigation found fewer than 475 cases of possible voter fraud in the six states where Trump contested his defeat, far from enough to sway the election's outcome. In Pennsylvania alone, Biden won by more than 80,000 votes over Trump.
The Democratic Party The bill is voted on in the House of Representatives Republican lawmakers, who want to allow counties to process mailed ballots before Election Day — known as precounting — have warned that it “could lead to various forms of irregularities and fraud.”
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said he had not heard of any state where such fraud had occurred.
The bill passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats, but has stalled in the Senate, where Republicans are demanding that the House first pass a constitutional amendment expanding voter ID requirements.
“I'm very concerned about the public perception and concern that our process is not safe, and we need to find opportunities to make that process safer,” said Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, a Republican.
Democratic House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said he also was concerned about the legislative gridlock and its potential impact in November.
“We went through a precount to let people know who the winners are as quickly and accurately as possible, and it's been held up,” Bradford said.
Meanwhile, battles over mail-in voting are mounting in the courts in the state.
One lawsuit filed by Republican lawmakers seeks to force mail-in ballots to be counted at polling places instead of at county elections offices, a move that county governments opposed, saying in court papers would “add significant complexity and burden to the administration of elections.”
Democrats and left-leaning groups have filed lawsuits in state and federal courts over the practice of discarding mail-in ballots that have missing or incorrectly handwritten dates on the outer envelopes.
At least two Republican-controlled counties are also being sued for failing to help voters fix technical errors in their mail-in ballots, such as missing dates or missing secrecy envelopes, to avoid having their ballots discarded.
One bright spot is that counties are getting better at counting mail-in ballots.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, about 40% of Pennsylvania's eligible voters, or 2.6 million people, voted by mail, creating chaos in counties and leading to nearly four days of post-election counting to determine the presidential winner. Can be declaredwhich will determine the winner of the contest.
Since then, counties have purchased more high-speed processing machines and tweaked their Election Day operations to count votes more efficiently.
Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, expects to have its results by election night instead of most of the next day in 2020.
Philadelphia plans to complete much of its vote counting this fall within about 24 hours of the polls closing, and with the capacity to process ballots before Election Day, the work could be finished by Election Night.
“This is a very normal practice that's done all across the country,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican elections official in Philadelphia. “And because they can't do that in Pennsylvania, they're not going to count all the votes on election night. That's the only thing that's causing this, and the state legislature could have fixed this.”
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