OPINION:
Electronic voting machines were supposed to make elections simpler and faster. Despite their widespread use, several House races and one Senate race remain unresolved. We must do better.
Although Dave McCormick will end up as Pennsylvania’s new senator when the dust settles, the election is subject to an automatic recount that delays the final result. A few media outlets, such as Reuters, waited until Thursday to call the race in the Republican’s favor even though the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey, never had a realistic path to victory.
Tardiness has consequences. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, initially denied Mr. McCormick a seat at the Capitol for new member orientation. After the GOP objected, Mr. McCormick was allowed to attend, but his vote for the new Senate majority leader nearly went uncounted.
That’s quite a difference from the “count anything that looks like a vote” standard being used in heavily Democratic areas of the Keystone State. Local officials are openly defying a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling setting election procedures.
Mr. McCormick responded with a lawsuit Wednesday to stop the Democratic majority on the Bucks County Commission from counting 405 mail-in ballots that had either the wrong date on them or no date at all.
State law is unambiguous on this point. It says voters must “fill out, date and sign the declaration” on the ballot return envelope if it is to be counted. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled just before the Nov. 5 election that this is mandatory and must be enforced.
That’s just one of the questionable moves the commission has made. It also decided to count 4,500 provisional ballots from, for instance, voters who were issued a mail-in ballot but decided to show up and vote at the polls as well. It’s legal to do so, as long as the person first hands in the blank ballot received in the mail.
The commissioners are accepting ballots from those who didn’t turn in the extra ballot, looking the other way at the possibility that a person’s vote may have been counted twice. Bucks County is going rogue.
“Precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws anytime they want,” Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said on Thursday. “So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”
This whole mess is a consequence of Pennsylvania lawmakers’ 2019 decision to allow “no excuse” mail-in voting. As in every state that used the COVID-19 pandemic to water down election integrity rules, the predictable consequence has been to make the process less secure and election night outcomes less certain.
Countries with far less wealth than our own have no trouble running same-day elections without needing months to figure out who won each race. In June, India took one day to count 642 million votes in parliamentary elections. Each vote had its own paper receipt, and tallies were subjected to random audits to ensure accuracy.
Florida likewise solved the embarrassing problems from the 2000 election and counted 10 million votes on election night. Other states take weeks to determine the results because Democrats believe they can use the chaos to their advantage.
President-elect Donald Trump should, as he has proposed, restore sanity to the system. Requiring voter identification and curtailing mail-in balloting would be a good start.
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