No. of Recommendations: 15
If you live in Pennsylvania and plan on voting by mail-in ballot, be very careful when mailing your ballot.
The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court issued a ruling last week that any mail-in ballot missing a hand-written date on the outer envelope must be rejected. Why? Well, for the best reason... Because...
In the Pennsylvania system, voters mark up their ballot, put that inside an innner black envelope, then place the black envelope inside a white outer envelope, seal that, write the date on it, then mail it in. When it arrives, the outer envelope is opened and the inner envelope is opened and the ballot is stamped with a date/time stamp reflecting when it was physically received. This stamp is sufficient for the rest of the ballot's life to confirm whether it was received by the cut-off date and time. The written datestamp on the outer envelope has zero correlation to any opportunity for fraud and shouldn't be trusted if present. Only the internal stamp only in possession of the election officials should count as proof of timely arrival.
Yet Republicans filed suit to attempt to force the outright rejection of all incoming ballots without an outer date written on the envelope, even those received PRIOR to election day and pre-stamped with the actual arrival date. That case went all the way to the PSSC who agreed.
Why would Republicans care so much about this? Possibly because a higher percentage of Democrats cast ballots via mail-in and in prior elections, the number of incoming ballots without a voter-written date was considerably high. Voila! An easy way to supress ballots from Democratic leaning areas and swing margins toward Republicans.
Some counties have implemented notification processes to "cure" such defective ballots by contacting the voter and having them come in and correct the problem, etc. However, Democracy Docket reported that Republicans actually SUED these counties in a attempt to block ANY effort to cure such ballots. In other words, again... This isn't about protecting against fraud, it isn't about encouraging turn-out. It's about creating pointless procedural steps, identifying correlations between steps that get messed up and votes you want to supress, then pushing for strict enforcement of pointless rules that shave away votes you don't like.
WTH
