In Penn­syl­va­nia, one of the par­a­mount states of our mor­tal com­bat elec­toral sys­tem, vot­ing by mail is le­gal, safe, read­ily ad­min­is­tered and doc­u­mented. After nearly four years and mil­lions of dol­lars of in­ves­ti­ga­tion, there still isn’t a speck of ev­i­dence to sup­port Don­ald Trump’s claims.

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.

GOP: In­val­i­date them

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 that agenda.

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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. 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 — but that was 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 de­clared, 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. He was sub­se­quently ap­pointed to be the state’s top elec­tion of­fi­cial by Demo­cratic Gover­nor Josh Sha­piro. Caught in the par­ti­san cross­fire, he is now a de­fen­dant in the law­suit over bal­lot en­ve­lopes.

Notice and cure

Disqual­i­fied mail bal­lots are not an in­sig­nifi­cant mat­ter in Penn­syl­va­nia. In the 2022 mid­term elec­tion, county of­fi­cials dis­qual­i­fied more than 16,000 mail-in bal­lots 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.

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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 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. “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.

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 re­cently de­cided that the county would no lon­ger no­tify vot­ers of bal­lot er­rors or per­mit them to be fixed.

It may mat­ter

Lies about voter fraud have long been used to un­der­mine law­ful vot­ing. 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. His previous article was “MAGA's great for some, until it gets personal.”

First Published: June 7, 2024, 9:30 a.m.