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In Pennsylvania, one of the paramount states of our mortal combat electoral system, voting by mail is legal. It’s also safe and readily administered and documented. As in other swing states won by Joe Biden, the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was scrutinized, adjudicated and relentlessly attacked.
Despite months of partisan effort, nonpartisan analysis and well-funded investigations, the “clown car”— former Attorney General William Barr’s phrase — that carried Donald Trump’s claims eventually crashed into an unyielding wall of reality. The wild allegations of fraud were lies. Nearly four years and millions of dollars later, there still isn’t a speck of evidence to support them.
Yet for the con artists, propagandists and insurrectionists who advanced the lies, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.
And so the Republican Party continues to wage war on mail ballots and on the voters who cast them, even as it quietly encourages its own voters to forget the disinformation of the past and embrace this civic convenience. The GOP position is basically: We don’t want mail ballots, but if we must have them, we want as many invalidated as possible. A lawsuit filed last week in Pennsylvania seeks to protect mail ballots from precisely that agenda.
Pennsylvania requires mail ballots to be enclosed in inner secrecy and outer return envelopes. That uniquely bar-coded return envelope must then be dated. Each envelope containing a completed ballot must be received by the appropriate election office no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day. Despite that timeliness requirement, if the otherwise irrelevant date on the envelope is missing or is written incorrectly, the ballot inside is no good. So, a trivial mistake can rob a citizen of their vote.
A group of liberal organizations has sued Pennsylvania’s top election official and election officials in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, claiming the officials have “arbitrarily disqualified” thousands of votes due to “an inconsequential paperwork error.”
The lawsuit is the latest front in the battle over Act 77, the vote-by-mail law adopted in 2019 with the legislature’s overwhelming support. Republicans controlled the legislature then — before Trump targeted mail voting as part of his broad assault on American democracy. Caught between Trump’s lies and the “historic election reform” they had celebrated only months before, Pennsylvania Republicans lined up behind the new MAGA propaganda, declaring, in essence, that they had always been at war with the vote-by-mail law that they themselves had enacted.
One Republican who kept telling the truth was Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, who was targeted by Trump for failing to support his disinformation campaign. Like other election officials who performed their jobs responsibly and spoke accurately, Schmidt and his family were threatened by MAGA cultists. Schmidt was subsequently appointed to be the state’s top election official by Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro. Caught in the partisan crossfire, Schmidt is now a defendant in the lawsuit over ballot envelopes.
Disqualified mail ballots are not an insignificant matter in Pennsylvania. In the 2022 midterm election, the state said, more than 16,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified by county officials because they lacked secrecy envelopes or proper signatures or dates. Democrats cast more mail ballots than Republicans did, including more than two-thirds of the ballots that were subsequently canceled. Nearly 8,000 midterm ballots were invalidated because the outer envelope was missing a voter signature or because it was either undated or incorrectly dated. In the 2020 election, Biden defeated Trump in Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes.
In another lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania is suing Butler County, a bastion of MAGA chaos and dysfunction in western Pennsylvania, for failing to alert voters when their mail ballots are flawed, and giving those voters a chance to “cure” the flaws so that their votes count. “In that case, the county rejected provisional ballots from voters who forgot to include the secrecy envelope with their mail ballot,” ACLU of Pennsylvania spokesman Andy Hoover said. A similar complaint failed in federal court when a panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ACLU in March.
In 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected a petition from the state Democratic Party requesting several voting changes. One request was that the court require all counties “that have knowledge of an incomplete or incorrectly filled out ballot,” along with relevant voter contact information, to contact the voter and provide “the opportunity to cure” a defective ballot. Votebeat reported that the rejection rate for ballots declines significantly “when a county notifies voters and allows them to fix, or cure, the error.” At least 17 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties enable some type of curing, according to Votebeat.
While the “notice and cure” process wasn’t required by the court, it also wasn’t prohibited. But Pennsylvania Republicans, consistent with nationwide efforts to mount obstacles to voting, have sought to restrict notice and cure so that fewer ballots end up being counted.
The ACLU is currently analyzing policies across Pennsylvania, and the organization seems likely to target additional counties. Washington County, southwest of Butler County and another locale warped by MAGA conspiracy theories, recently decided that the county would no longer notify voters of ballot errors or permit them to be fixed.
Lies about voter fraud have long been used to undermine lawful voting. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, echoed by thousands of followers, transformed that propaganda into treachery and violence, fueling an attempted overthrow of the republic. The war on mail ballots may seem less radical than other GOP proposals, some of which would dismantle American democracy outright. But the election in Pennsylvania this fall is likely to be close. The number of rejected mail ballots filed by lawfully registered voters probably won’t be larger than the margin of victory. Then again, it might, in which case, picking the wrong date could result in picking the wrong president.
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.