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By Jane C. Timm
With Pennsylvania expected to be a close and crucial state in the 2024 race for the presidency, it's unusual election laws are again under the microscope.
First, there's the counting. The state doesn’t have early voting — instead offering the time-consuming and paperwork heavy option of on-demand mail balloting. It also doesn’t process its mail ballots ahead of Election Day.
So, in the hours after polls close on Election Day, when many battleground states will be reporting their early, mail and Election Day totals, Pennsylvania will be counting ballots around the clock in a mad dash to catch up.
Then there's the "fixing" or "curing" of ballots with minor errors, such as mail-in ballot mixing a signature. If a ballot has errors, each county in the state decides on its own whether it will let voters "fix" them, creating significant differences in voting policy throughout the state. (Most states have a statewide policy for curing ballots.)
And finally, after the ballots are counted, there can be challenges. Pennsylvania laws give residents a spate of ways to challenge and delay certification of the results with recounts, appeals, and litigation.
Election experts say Pennsylvania's laws make it fertile ground for rigged election claims to flourish. They also stressed that there is little reason to believe that unsubstantiated voter fraud claims—and any lawsuits associated with them—will actually stop the certification of the results.
“The Pennsylvania legislature had multiple opportunities to clarify and improve the state’s election law,” said Nate Persily, an NBC News election law expert and professor at Stanford Law School. “It deliberately chose not to. The gaps in the law provide a vacuum that gets filled with conspiracy theories and require the courts to bring coherence to an incoherent regime.”
Former President Donald Trump and his campaign are already targeting Pennsylvania, falsely claiming there is large-scale “cheating” and “voter fraud” at play.
Trump's campaign has repeatedly portrayed the long lines in Bucks County during on-demand mail balloting as a form of voter suppression that, according to vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, was "voter fraud" perpetrated by Democrats. (The state's Republican secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, rejected Vance's claim.)
“They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster, they’ve cheated. We caught ‘em with 2600 votes,” Trump said at a recent rally, misconstruing a real incident where hundreds of fraudulent voter registration applications were identified and rejected in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania...Read full article
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