It’s official.
Well, it was already official because it was Pennsylvania law. And because the U.S. Supreme Court had confirmed it.
What is it? Election officials may not count mail-in ballots that are undated or incorrectly dated.
Official, yes, but now even more official.
On November 1, a week before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that yes, election officials must follow Pennsylvania election law that says you can’t count undated or incorrectly dated ballots.
A voter who mails in a ballot is obliged to sign and date the outer envelope before sending it off. The court orders election officials to “refrain from counting any absentee and mail-in ballots received for the November 8, 2022, general election that are contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes.”
The ruling was issued in response to litigation initiated by the Republican Party, which has launched a slew of lawsuits around the country to combat shady election practices.
The court’s clarification is important. A problem loomed over the upcoming election. Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had been giving the go-ahead for officials to count ballots whether they’re dated properly or not . . . and to heck with election law and the SCOTUS. Until the ruling, county officials throughout Pennsylvania lacked consistent policies about how to handle bungled ballots.
Of course, when reasonable election rules are ignored, it’s easier to commit election fraud — notwithstanding the disingenuous claim advanced by some proponents of lackadaisical election procedures that fraud is either a vanishingly small problem or does not exist at all.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Following the Law”
If you don’t look for fraud, you don’t find it.
(Corollary to “if you’re not doing anything “wrong”, then you don’t need rights.”)
But…But…But… How else can democrats win if they can’t cheat?
“Of course, when reasonable election rules are ignored …”
What’s a “reasonable election rule?”
For obvious reasons, courts should limit themselves to enforcing valid laws rather than deciding for themselves what’s “reasonable” outside the constraints of how laws are supposed to be made (pursuant to e.g. constitutions).
That said, “your vote doesn’t count if you have a brain fart and write ’10/12/22′ on your signature line when it’s actually 10/13/22” doesn’t sound “reasonable” at all.
Yes, an error of writing the date of yester-day or of to-morrow doesn’t seem significant. Happily, such an error would almost surely not be detected unless it involved a date before ballots were received by voters or after the postmark.
But I think that our standard should not be to view voters as rightful shareholders in a collectively owned association, but as something like jurors, making jydgments about things that are not rightfully theirs, and expected to make these judgements responsibly or not to participate. In that context, some errors that don’t otherwise seem meaningful may be taken as markers for whether a voter was behaving dutifully.