WASHINGTON — Pennsylvania officials must make changes to how they run elections and count ballots to avoid a repeat of 2020, when President Donald Trump and his Republican allies said the election was stolen and tried to overturn the results, according to a new report.
Among the changes recommended by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University: Allow voters to fix problems with mail-in ballots rather than lose the right to vote, protect election workers against intimidation, and require officials to certify elections based on verified vote totals.
One of the most significant changes recommended would be to allow election workers to begin processing absentee ballots when they come in, verifying that they were properly cast, rather than wait until Election Day to start opening the envelopes.
In 2020, with more Republicans voting in-person, Donald Trump had an early lead over Joe Biden until the absentee ballots were counted. That was called a “red mirage” because it was going to be just a temporary GOP advantage due to the delay in processing the mailed-in votes.
“We’re quite concerned about Pennsylvania,” said report author Alice Clapman, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center. “There have been active efforts to subvert elections in the past. The prohibition against pre-processing feeds disinformation on Election Day and puts the system at risk.”
Ellen Lyon, a spokeswoman for Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, said Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration “is committed to ensuring safe, secure, and fair elections in Pennsylvania. That commitment includes standing firm against any efforts to undermine Pennsylvanians’ voting rights, ensuring every legal ballot is counted, improving the efficiency and transparency of our elections, and protecting the security and integrity of our elections and our election infrastructure.”
The problems aren’t unknown, and state officials can act on some of them without legislative approval, but they could face court challenges as they did in the last election, said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington research group.
“Ultimately, the responsibility for clarifying obvious vagueness in the law falls on the Legislature that created that vagueness,” Mr. Becker said. “This isn’t a revelation. It’s just that they haven't been fixed. The same Legislature that’s failed to act will criticize anyone acting administratively.”
House State Government Committee chair Scott Conklin, D-Centre, did not respond to requests for comment.
Pennsylvania was the most populous of the battleground states that was at the center of Republican-led efforts to reject the certified electoral votes for Mr. Biden and swing the state to Mr. Trump.
“It’s fair to say that former President Trump brought a new level of polarization and election denial into our conversation,” Ms. Clapman said.
Both the federal and Georgia indictments charged Mr. Trump and his GOP allies with trying to submit false slates of electors in an attempt to get Congress to throw out the state’s electoral votes.
In addition, Western Pennsylvania U.S. Reps. Mike Kelly, Guy Reschenthaler and Glenn Thompson were among the majority of House Republicans voting to reject Pennsylvania’s certified electoral votes and asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw them out.
And the Republicans nominated an election denier, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, for governor last year.
“There’s an ethos that really got started in 2020 of not accepting losses and not being willing to transition power when your party loses and doing everything to fight an election loss, even when it's clear what the will of the voters is,” Ms. Clapman said.
“You see it in conspiracy theories — that's driving a lot of the problems,” she said. “It’s causing vigilante activities, it’s causing a level of challenges to voter registration that is far worse than we’ve seen in the past, it's caused violence against election workers.”
Even now, as Mr. Trump has a huge lead in polls for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In a CNN poll released in August, 71% of GOP voters still said Mr. Biden did not legitimately win the presidency, even as numerous officials in Mr. Trump’s administration said the election was “the most secure in American history.”
“As long as Pennsylvania is viewed as a bellwether state that’s narrowly divided, it’s going to be a state where people who perceive they are losing are going to spread disinformation,” Mr. Becker said.
Much of the controversy in the Keystone State in 2020 stemmed from the increase in absentee balloting during the pandemic. The Republican-controlled state Legislature in 2019 voted to expand mail-in voting, but then GOP officials railed against it following Mr. Trump’s lead, even asking the courts to overturn the law that they themselves passed.
Meanwhile, there was a delay in processing the mail ballots because Pennsylvania, unlike most other states, doesn’t allow its poll workers to get a head start on verifying the votes cast absentee, such as checking signatures to make sure that the signature on the envelope matches the voter’s. That gives Pennsylvania election workers less time to vet the ballots and ferret out possible fraud.
“That’s the reason almost every single state — deeply red states, deeply blue states – allow for pre-processing,” Mr. Becker said. “This is not just good for getting election results faster, it is also good for election integrity….You don't want to invite chaos into the election process. It was exploited by the losers to make it seem that there were security issues.”
In addition, Republicans in the state sought to throw out millions of absentee ballots on technical grounds, such as the voter forgetting to put the date the ballot was signed on the proper envelope, or leaving out the privacy sleeve when mailing in the ballot.
The report said the Legislature needed to act to ensure such mail-in ballots are counted.
The Shapiro administration “looks forward to working with the legislature to enact commonsense election reforms that will increase voter participation and allow counties to begin canvassing mail ballots before Election Day,” Ms. Lyon said. “We believe that voters and our dedicated election officials would welcome these changes.”
It remains to be seen whether the Republicans and Democrats in Harrisburg will agree. For now, Republicans, stung by their losses in 2020 and 2022, have started to embrace absentee balloting.
“Without legislative reform, wrangling over the counting of absentee ballots — including wrangling over whether defects can be cured — will continue,” the Brennan Center report said. “Votes will be discarded if they arrive after Election Day, or for purely bureaucratic reasons. And another red mirage is also likely.”
Jonathan D. Salant: jsalant@post-gazette.com, @JDSalant
First Published: September 8, 2023, 10:17 p.m.
Updated: September 11, 2023, 6:59 p.m.