OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The no excuse mail-in voting rules that applied in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania have now been struck down by the state’s Supreme Court, though it will not affect the outcome of the 2020 elections.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the State Constitution would have to be amended before such a mail-in voting rule could be applied, MSN reported.
“No-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient and has been used four times in the history of Pennsylvania,” Commonwealth Court Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt said in the decision on Friday. “If presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted. But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.”
In other words, you cannot simply make up rules on the fly sans the benefit of actually changing the state Constitution to make them legal.
The majority Democrat court, five Democrats and two Republicans, made the decision which can be appealed to a higher court.
Pennsylvania expanded mail voting with a 2019 law that was heralded as a bipartisan compromise as it was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf. It later became a target for Republican criticism when then-President Donald Trump falsely criticized mail voting as a source of widespread fraud.
In August 2021, 14 Republican members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives filed suit against the state’s mail voting law alleging it unconstitutional. The Democratic National Committee and the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, as well as several GOP county committees, intervened to defend the law with the state.
In 2020, when congregating at the polls posed a health risk due to the pandemic, mail voting surged in popularity; according to NBC News, more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters cast a mail or early in-person ballot.
Former President Donald Trump celebrated the news in an email to supporters on Friday.
“Big news out of Pennsylvania, great patriotic spirit is developing at a level that nobody thought possible. Make America Great Again!” the 45th President of the United States said.
The decision came a day after the court decided to hear an appeal from Lehigh County Judge candidate Zachary Cohen in a case that argued undated mail-in ballots could change the outcome of an upcoming race for county judge, McCall reported.
The denial means that the court upheld a Commonwealth Court ruling that 257 undated mail-in ballots should be discarded. The Commonwealth Court decision overturned a prior ruling by Lehigh County Judge Edward Reibman, who ruled that undated ballots should be counted because discarding them would be at odds with a 2020 Supreme Court decision on uncounted ballots.
Adam Bonin, Cohen’s lawyer, argued that the Supreme Court should hear the case to resolve unanswered questions from that 2020 decision, where judges ruled 4-3 to count undated mail-in ballots, but did not close the book on whether undated ballots should be counted in the future.
Cohen is 74 votes behind Republican David Ritter in the race for one of the three seats on Lehigh County’s Common Pleas Court. The 257 undated ballots in question could tip the race’s outcome in Cohen’s favor.
“We’re obviously disappointed in the court’s ruling, not only because of it’s impact on Zac, but especially for all those voters who deserve to be heard in this election,” Bonin responded to the decision.
Bonin said that he and Cohen are weighing their legal options in the case.
Robert Daday, the attorney for Ritter, celebrated the decision.
“We’re very happy with the decision by the Supreme Court, we believe it to be the correct decision,” he said.
