THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE COURT MADE A BIG MISTAKE

 

                      …40% of Pennsylvania’s voters used mail-in ballots in 2020

 

The state certified that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 election

 

You will know that we have a real issue about our nation’s democracy, when you have a partisan GOP court striking down a pro-mail-in voting law.

That’s exacting what’s happening when a Pennsylvania court struck down the state’s expansive mail-in voting law as unconstitutional. 

This delivered a temporary win to the state Republicans who had challenged the law. 

But they only challenged the law after the former president, Donald Trump, falsely claimed mail-in voting resulted in election fraud.

The state has performed a recount and an investigation and stated that there was no voting fraud

While the two-year-old law was struck down by a majority of the five-judge panel of the Commonwealth Court, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) and the state’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro (D), promised a swift appeal, criticizing the court’s opinion as being “based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning.”

“The administration will immediately appeal this decision to the state Supreme Court and today’s lower court ruling will have no immediate effect on mail-in voting pending a final decision on the appeal,” Wolf said Friday

The state’s Republican-controlled legislature had passed the law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019.  This was done at the time, with bipartisan support.  Previously, Pennsylvania voters could cast absentee ballots, only if they met certain criteria.

Amid the current pandemic, more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters cast mail-in absentee ballots out of the 6.9 million votes.  As the state’s Democrats out-number the Republican voters, it is obvious a great number of those 2.6 million votes were from Democrats.  And removing a large percentage of them could seriously affect the voting results.

This same court said Friday that any changes to the voting law would require a constitutional amendment.

“No-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient and has been used four times in the history of Pennsylvania.  Approximately 1.38 million voters have expressed their interest in voting by mail permanently,” Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote. “If presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted. But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.’ ”

In bringing the legal challenge, some Republicans in the state echoed Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and his criticism of mail-in voting, with several seeking to undo the law for which they once voted.  They are being totally hypocritical.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Governor Wolf pointed out the GOP reversal.

“The Republican-controlled legislature passed Act 77 with strong bipartisan support in 2019 to make voting more safe, secure, and accessible and millions of Pennsylvanians have embraced it,” Wolf said. “The simple fact is that despite near-unanimous Republican legislative support for this historic update to Pennsylvania election law, they now want to strip away mail-in voting in the service of the ‘big lie.’”

The Attorney General Shapiro, in his statement, stressed that the court’s ruling will not have “any immediate impact” on upcoming elections. The state is holding both gubernatorial and a U.S. Senate election this year.

The Pennsylvania Department of State also said in a statement that it disagreed with the ruling and that it is “working to file an immediate appeal” to the state’s Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic majority.

The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s spokeswoman Wanda Murren told voters in a statement, “today’s ruling on the use of mail-in ballots has no immediate effect on mail-in voting. Go ahead and request your mail-in ballot for the May primary election.” The statement added: “The Department is notifying all county election boards that they should proceed with all primary election preparations as they were before today’s Commonwealth Court ruling. There should be no change in their procedures.”

The panel of the state court that declared the law unconstitutional is made up of three Republicans and two Democrats. The three Republicans ruled in favor of a group of Republicans in the state legislature, who challenged the law in light of Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. As expected, the two Democrats dissented.

Also as expected, the former president, whose debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud have been promoted by some Pennsylvania Republicans, he celebrated the decision to strike the law Friday.

“Big news out of Pennsylvania, great patriotic spirit is developing at a level that nobody thought possible,” he said in a statement.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court took up a similar challenge to the state’s expanded voting law after the 2020 presidential election. Republican plaintiffs demanded that all mail ballots be thrown out after the fact. Fortunately, the court rejected the challenge on the grounds that it had been filed too late.

In October 2019, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht wrote that the petitioners challenging the state’s new voting law “could have brought this action at any time between October 31, 2019, when Governor Wolf signed Act 77 into law, and April 28, 2020, when this Court still retained exclusive jurisdiction over constitutional challenges to it.”

What remains unclear, however, is whether the court will approach a prospective challenge differently than one seeking to alter the administration of a past election.

The no-excuse mail-in voting law was a result of a compromise between the parties: Democrats were able to legalize mail-in voting expansions, and Republicans succeeded in abolishing straight-ticket voting.

At the time, Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R) said the voting expansion law was “a worthy one.”

“Ultimately, this is the most significant modernization of our elections code in decades,” Corman said.

While Corman, now president pro tempore of the state’s Senate and a candidate for governor, was not among the Republican challengers named in the suit against the mail-in voting expansion, he has questioned the results of the 2020 election and has said he of course, has talked to Trump about efforts to investigate the results.

Corman did not respond to a request for comment on the court’s decision Friday.

Joe Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania by less than one percentage point. Allegations of significant voter fraud in the state have been debunked. Pennsylvania’s flip from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 was largely driven by Democratic gains among political independents and lower-income voters for the Scranton-born Biden.

This is many times referred to as Joe Biden’s “home state”.  Streets and Expressways in the state have been re-named using Joe Biden’s name, so many of those in Pennsylvania consider the president as the own.

The state usually does vote Republican, but even these people couldn’t live with Donald Trump.

Copyright G. Ater 2022