Claiming that no-excuse absentee voting creates an “equal opportunity” to vote, Democrats at the state and national level have asked to join a lawsuit brought by House Republicans to repeal Pennsylvania’s absentee voting law.
The Democratic National Committee AND Pennsylvania Democratic Party required intervene in the case of A lawsuit filed in August by 14 legislative Republicans who asked the Commonwealth Court to declare the law unconstitutional. In a 34-page lawsuit, Republicans asked the court to prevent Pennsylvania from issuing absentee ballots to voters without a work, health or religious excuse for not voting in person at the polls.
But Democrats who filed the bill Friday say eliminating mail-in voting would impact voter turnout, especially among working families and minority communities.
“The DNC is taking action to ensure that all eligible voters in Pennsylvania have an equal opportunity to participate in our elections, and we stand ready to step in to defend voting freedom wherever partisan lawsuits are filed seeking to challenge voters’ ability to cast ballots,” the chairman said in a statement DNC Jaime Harrison.
If approved, interveners and their attorneys will join the case and participate in the court proceedings.
“Continuing the fight for stronger participation in our democracy is more important than ever, and we are proud to stand with our partners to defend the voices of everyday Pennsylvanians,” Nancy Patton Mills, chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said in a statement.
Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, signed the bill into law: Act 77 — in 2019. Gained bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled Legislature to allow no-excuse absentee voting. Since several elections were held with changes, county election officials have he said there are problems with Act 77, but their calls for reform focus on moving up the deadline to request an absentee ballot and providing more time to pre-collect absentee ballots or process the ballots before they are counted.
Previously reported via Capital-Star 11 of 14 House GOP lawmakers who filed the lawsuit voted for the bill; two were not in the General Assembly at the time, and one, state Rep. David Zimmerman, R-Lancaster, voted against it. Nine reasons signed a December 2020 letter asking Congress to object to Pennsylvania’s electoral college results, and the majority engaged in other efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election.
Their lawsuit argues that the change should have been presented to voters as a constitutional amendment, not legislation. But lawmakers abandoned the amendment process after reaching an agreement with Wolf on the framework of Act 77, which swapped approval for mail-in ballots with eliminating straight-ticket voting and funding up-to-date voting machines.
The rethinking of mail-in voting began after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden and launched a campaign of baseless claims of voter fraud, casting doubt on the results.
Trump’s allies including Pennsylvania lawmakersand lawmakers who won re-election in 2020 repeated the baseless allegations. In a lawsuit filed after the 2020 election, U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-16, sought to invalidate millions of mail-in ballots. The state Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit, saying it was too tardy to challenge the law. Two conservative justices, who are the minority on the seven-member panel, have signaled interest in hearing arguments.
As required by law, the survey was conducted in all 67 Pennsylvania counties post-election audits statistical sampling after the 2020 general election in sixty-three counties “mitigating risk“audits”. None of the audits found evidence of voter fraud or election misconduct.
Above 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters cast their absentee ballots in the 2020 general election. In May, the Department of State, which oversees elections, reported that more than 605,000 absentee ballots were cast in the primary election.
According to data, 860,000 voters applied for a mail-in ballot ahead of the November 2 general election. state data.
