Pennsylvania election officials frustrated after lawmakers failed to respond to absentee ballot requests

Pennsylvania election officials are warning that vote counting in the key state could again take several days due to a lack of action in Harrisburg. creating an opportunity for bad actors to sow distrust in the results.

County election officials have been petitioning state lawmakers for years to update the state’s election code. They have also persistently asked the General Assembly to clarify which mail-in ballots can and can’t be counted, addressing voting rights disputes that have raged in Pennsylvania since no-consequence absentee voting was authorized in 2019.

But as November approaches, little has changed since 2020, when former President Donald Trump exploited the tardy vote-counting process to promote baseless claims of election fraud following his defeat.

After four years, state lawmakers are unlikely to make the changes before Election Day, putting additional stress on county officials and setting up a situation where the state will once again find itself at the center of conspiracy theories and controversy during a close election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

“They should be ashamed of themselves,” said Forrest Lehman, Lycoming County elections director. “Counties have been asking for some of this relief for years, and we still haven’t gotten it, and then everyone seems happy to let us take the fall.”

Meanwhile, a court battle over which mail-in votes should be counted and which should be thrown out is ongoing, leaving officials unsure exactly which votes they will have to count or throw out in November. Meanwhile, efforts to reform state law to extend the processing time for mail-in votes have failed in the Capitol.

“They’re not doing their job. So [counties] “We need to be the adults in the room and figure out how to interpret that ambiguity and come up with rules that we think make sense.”

A window into disinformation

Under current law, county election offices cannot begin opening absentee ballots and preparing them for counting (a process called “precounting”) before 7 a.m. on Election Day.

A short voting period could strain resources by requiring more workers on Election Day to ensure that mail-in votes are ready to be counted before polls close at 8 p.m. It also makes it harder for election officials to finish counting mail-in votes that day.

The State Department said in a statement that more time should be impartial. Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt called legislative inaction “frustrating” in an interview with the Washington Post last month.

In 2020, that strain was one reason county elections offices took days to finish counting mail-in votes, and it fueled baseless claims of voter fraud.

When voters went to bed on election night, Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania in the votes that had been counted. Biden ultimately won Pennsylvania because of his overwhelming lead in mail-in votes counted in subsequent days. Trump baselessly insisted that this was proof cheating. Schmidt, then a Republican member of the Philadelphia City Council, faced death threats after he spoke out against Trump’s false claims and the former president mentioned him by name on Twitter.

The former president has indicated he will likely make fraud allegations again in November if Harris wins the state. Trump campaign launched a website last weekSwamp the Vote to encourage Republicans to vote early and by mail. Website messages continue to claim, without evidence, that Democrats can cheat by using mail-in voting — even as Trump encourages his supporters to vote by mail.

“We don’t want to see what happened in 2020 happen again,” Trump says in a video on the website. “But until then, Republicans have to win, and we have to use every tool at our disposal to defeat the Democrats.”

Supporters of this idea fear that inaction by legislators before the start of the election campaign will lead to the spread of disinformation again and create a potentially dangerous situation.

“The legislature’s failure to act is a complete abdication of responsibility to all Pennsylvanians, not just Pennsylvania voters, if not the entire country,” said Lauren Cristella, president of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Committee of Seventy, a government oversight body based in Philadelphia.

City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, said the window of time between the unofficial call of the race by the Associated Press and the closure of television stations and polling places is an opportunity for disinformation to spread. Votes are not formally certified until counties conduct their campaigns in the days and weeks following the election.

“If we had held early voting, we could have released mail-in voting results on election night along with in-person voting results, which would have closed and narrowed the window of time in which disinformation could spread.”

If turnout is high enough and enough votes are cast by mail, election officials will face many of the same logistical hurdles they faced in 2020, which resulted in mail-in votes being counted after election night. However, the vote-counting process is expected to be faster this year than in 2020.

Fewer absentee ballots are expected than in 2020, when the pandemic caused high absentee voting rates across the country. The number of voters casting absentee ballots fell dramatically in recent elections.

Bluestein predicted that mail-in votes would be counted in Philadelphia within a day or two in November.

In 2022, lawmakers passed a bill offering more state funding to election offices, but in exchange it banned outside funding and elections offices are now required to work around the clock until all the votes are counted. That means office workers will count all night long instead of taking breaks.

In addition, election offices have had more time to comply with Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee ballot law. They have purchased equipment that speeds up the vote-counting process and have found ways to count large numbers of votes more efficiently.

“I’m confident we won’t see a delay as long as we had in 2020,” said City Commissioner Lisa Deeley, a Democrat. But she noted that when networks feel comfortable covering the race will depend in part on how many mail-in votes counties receive and how close the election is.

“It’ll take as long as it takes, and how long it takes and what that pressure point is, it all depends on the state of the race.”

State Rep. Seth Grove, a Republican from York County, said Pennsylvania counties have had relatively few problems counting votes quickly since they began working around the clock.

“7 a.m. [start time] “That, combined with the ongoing vote counting, really negated the need for additional days leading up to the counting of those votes, in my opinion,” Grove said, arguing that simply addressing the issue of vote counting ahead of time could have created issues with the county’s voting security measures.

Pennsylvania House Democrats introduced a bill in April that would allow for an extra week of early voting before Election Day. But the bill stalled in the GOP-controlled Senate.

State Sen. Cris Dush (R., Jefferson), who is in charge of election policy in the state Senate, did not respond to questions from the Inquirer about why he did not take up the bill, but Senate Republican leaders he told VoteBeat in May that they will not discuss changes to elections without considering the requirement to show voter ID.

Republicans passed legislation in 2021 that would have tied voter identification to early voting and other measures. It was vetoed by then-Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

“There are huge trust issues trying to find compromise between Republicans and Democrats,” Grove said. “We don’t want to see … where we negotiate in good faith and then the Democrats come back and reject those compromises in the legal process.”

State Rep. Scott Conklin, a state college Democrat, blamed political gamesmanship.

“They set it up so that if their guy wins, they won against the system. If their guy loses, well, it has to be, ‘Look, they stole the election,'” Conklin said of GOP lawmakers.

Rejected mail-in votes

Ahead of the November election, Pennsylvania’s election code, and particularly the laws enacted when lawmakers approved no-consequence absentee voting in 2019, remain the subject of a flurry of litigation.

Pennsylvania law requires voters to sign, date and place their ballot in an envelope to be counted.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Court issued an order Friday ordering election officials not to enforce a requirement that ballots be dated, finding that doing so violates election laws and does not serve a compelling government interest. The order could be appealed.

In addition to the ballot dating case, the American Civil Liberties Union has challenged Washington County’s lack of notification that votes were rejected. The litigation has led to frequently changing guidelines and an inconsistent response across the state, as counties interpret case law differently.

“In some ways, the Legislature is essentially delegating power to the courts,” said Thad Hall, Mercer County’s elections director. “Now you have this huge difference depending on where you live.”

The resolution of these court cases could bring more clarity on some issues by Election Day, depending on the rulings.

“Our goal is to clear this up one way or another before November,” said Marian Schneider, senior counsel for voting rights policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

Still, further changes based on court rulings and inconsistencies between counties could cause confusion before the election. Cristella, chairwoman of the Committee of Seventy, said it will be crucial for rulings to come out in a timely manner so voters can familiarize themselves with the modern rules.

“It just adds chaos that no one needs,” she said.