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Supporters of President Donald Trump gather outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in 2020 to protest the ongoing ballot counting inside.
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‘A lot of moving parts:’ Ex-judges, former Pa. Gov. Tom Corbett discuss election challenges

Victor J. Blue/The New York Times

‘A lot of moving parts:’ Ex-judges, former Pa. Gov. Tom Corbett discuss election challenges

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett headlined a panel of legal experts who addressed challenges with the state’s election certification process on Monday morning.

Keep Our Republic, which hosted the panel, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit active in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that Executive Director Ari Mittleman said aims to “demystify” election administration and litigation.

The organization will host panels in the coming weeks about court cases that could affect the election and further nuances of congressional election certification.

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Pennsylvania’s certification process will begin in earnest when polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 5. The first hurdle will be counting mail-in ballots promptly. In 2020, the process took until the weekend.

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This year, the count should be faster thanks to technological improvements in Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, said Mr. Corbett. Keep Our Republic also projected that there will be fewer mail-in ballots in general after historic highs driven by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

If the winner carries the vote by a margin of less than half a percent, it will trigger an automatic recount to verify the totals.

Counties have a deadline of Nov. 25 — 20 days after the election — to certify the results. However, if the state count still hasn’t been completed, there is no explicit mechanism to address it, said John Jones III, a former judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

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Mr. Jones speculated that Secretary of State Al Schmidt would have to file suit against the counties that are holding up the process.

“There’s really no penalty for a county lapsing over and past the deadline,” he said.

During this time, the process could be further muddled by litigation involving election fraud or other allegations of illegal activities, Mr. Corbett said.

The courts will be better prepared to quickly handle “frivolous” election-related lawsuits like the ones filed in 2020 by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., for his actions, Mr. Jones said.

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“You better bring your A-game if you’re an attorney and you’re going to file a suit to disenfranchise voters,” he said.

Should everything proceed on time, Gov. Josh Shapiro will issue a Certificate of Ascertainment on Dec. 11, listing the final vote totals and the state’s electors.

The electors will meet in Harrisburg on Dec. 17 to formally cast their votes. While Trump allies, led by now-disbarred lawyer John Eastman, pushed the Pennsylvania Legislature to override the popular vote by declaring a failed election in 2020, Mr. Corbett clarified that the Legislature has never had that ability.

Individual “faithless electors” have occasionally voted for other candidates but have never swung the outcome of an election in Pennsylvania, he said.

At last, Congress will officially certify the results of the election on Jan. 6, 2025, four years to the day since the pro-Trump attempted coup in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the capitol to stop the certification and which nearly threw the country into chaos.

Trump infamously pressured Vice President Mike Pence to illegally prevent the electors’ certification, leading Congress to strengthen the Electoral Count Act to explicitly forbid the vice president from interfering. 

There are fears of more political violence in 2024, especially after Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July. The Butler Bureau of Elections, miles from the site of Trump’s rally, has recently added bulletproof glass and is looking into installing a panic button in case of an attack.

Mr. Corbett described himself as an “optimist at heart” and said that he didn’t foresee any large-scale planned violence, only smaller incidents that local law enforcement could handle.

Facing what is likely to be a two-month slog of controversy and legal challenges, Mr. Corbett called for voters to have patience with election workers as the process plays out.

“All those people are there primarily as your neighbors doing their patriotic duty and also volunteering their time and efforts,” he said.

Mr. Jones acknowledged that there are “a lot of moving parts” to the system but believed that Pennsylvania’s 67 election bureaus and county commissioners are better prepared this year than they were in 2020.

“I’m heartened by how hard everybody is working to get this right,” he said.

First Published: September 30, 2024, 9:15 p.m.
Updated: September 30, 2024, 9:20 p.m.

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