Dem
49
GOP
51
Having the trifecta, as in Florida and Texas, helps a lot if you want to try to derail democracy. However, you don't HAVE to have the trifecta. Just controlling one chamber of the state legislature can be enough, as that is enough to stop legislation from being passed. Such is the case in Pennsylvania, where the GOP has a 28-22 majority in the state Senate.
There are two pretty obvious problems with Pennsylvania's approach to voting, and in both cases, the state's Democrats would like to fix them, and the state's Republicans say "no thank you." We had a brief mention of one of those yesterday. In short, the Keystone State has a dumb law that says that absentee ballot envelopes have to be correctly dated on the outside. As we pointed out yesterday, this information is irrelevant, since if a ballot arrives on time, it doesn't matter what's written on the outside (you could date it August 12, 2161, for all it matters). And if a ballot does not arrive on time, it still doesn't matter, since it won't be counted.
In our item, we wrote that the state Supreme Court decided that the date has to be there; end of story. As reader R.E.M. in Brooklyn, NY, wrote in to point out, that is not entirely accurate. The state Supremes dismissed the case on procedural grounds, because it somewhat sneakily named only two Pennsylvania counties (the two bluest ones, naturally). The Court said it has to be all or none, and so the plaintiffs could re-file.
Whether or not they will choose to do so is currently unknown. Obviously, this problem could be mooted if the legislature would just repeal the dumb law, but state Senate Republicans are not interested in doing so, because they believe the rule will kill more Democratic votes than Republican ones. At the very least, state Secretary of State Al Schmidt—who is a Republican, by the way, but was appointed by Democratic governor Josh Shapiro because he (Schmidt) has no tolerance for anti-democratic ballot shenanigans—has ordered that the year be printed on all envelopes. So, all people have to do is get the month and date right (or somewhat right). There should be considerably fewer ballots disqualified, as a result.
The other problem has to do with the processing of mail-in ballots. By state law, no pre-processing of ballots can be done in Pennsylvania until 7:00 a.m. on Election Day. It is one of the few states that is restrictive in this way, and the others—Alabama, Mississippi and North Dakota—have nowhere near as many people, and thus nowhere near as many ballots to process.
The downside to waiting like this is that it means Pennsylvania's vote tallies will not be completed until late on Election Day at best, and more likely until sometime after Election Day. This, in turn, creates the conditions for claims of chicanery and for lawsuits, since it is probable that Republicans will have the lead in the state early on, but that it will shrink and shrink and shrink once the mail-in (and Democratic-skewing) ballots are processed.
Again, the legislature could fix this by allowing mail-in ballots to be pre-processed before Election Day. But state Senate Republicans don't want to fix it, because they see the problem in the previous paragraph as a feature, not a bug. And so it is that everyone can see a train wreck looming, and yet there's nothing that anyone (outside of 28 people in the Pennsylvania state Senate) can do about it. (Z)