Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) may have finally conceded his election loss to Republican challenger David McCormick, but far too much damage has already been done to voter faith in our country’s electoral process.
It is, of course, bad enough that the state of Pennsylvania was still counting votes more than two weeks after Election Day. It is, indeed, disgraceful and culpably incompetent. Other states, such as Florida, begin counting ballots weeks before Election Day and mandate that all must be in by Election Day. This makes it easy to report the result on election night just hours after the polls close.
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Releasing results on election night builds trust in the process. Trust is a commodity far too rare in either party these days (see Democratic Party conspiracies relating to the 2024 election and Starlink). The longer it takes officials to count votes, the more voters legitimately doubt that the process is being conducted fairly and honestly. After all, if some states can count votes quickly, what prevents other states from doing the same, and is it nefarious?
Voter fear that the system is rigged is fueled by bad-faith partisan actors, most notably Democratic lawyer Mar Elias, who selectively challenges vote tallies in counties controlled by the Democratic Party and stacked with Democratic judges. This maximizes the chances that enough new votes can be found to overturn the current election results. Then, at precisely the point that the result is reversed, the count stops as though a magic number has been reached. It is obvious to voters that a heist on democracy is being perpetrated by a sharp ne’er-do-well attorney.
In the Pennsylvania Senate race, McCormick leads Casey (D-PA) by just under 17,000 votes in a state where over 17 million ballots were cast. Many of those ballots were mailed in, and such ballots come predominately from Democratic voters.
Pennsylvania state law is specific about what a mail-in ballot needs if it is to be considered a legitimate vote. It must have a handwritten valid date on the envelope. Before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that ballots without this handwritten date could not legally be counted. At the behest of Elias and the Casey campaign, three members of the Democratic-majority election boards in Bucks, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties voted to ignore the court and count ballots that failed to meet this straightforward state criterion. The strategy is to count otherwise invalid ballots in three overwhelmingly Democratic counties so Casey can find the votes needed to pass McCormick, and then the election result can be overturned.
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“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Democratic Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia said at a meeting last week, “and people violate laws anytime they want.”
Democratic Party officials should, we supposed, get credit for admitting they are breaking the law. However, two things should follow. First, they should not be allowed to do so, and the illegitimate ballots should be discarded. Second, one should always doubt the good faith of a Democrat who argues that he or she is fighting to preserve democracy in the face of right-wing threats. Their ethics are entirely circumstantial, and their only motive is power, not principle.
Fortunately, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled Bucks County and the two other Democratic counties and ordered them to stop counting illegal votes.
“The passion in my heart got the best of me, and I apologize for that,” Ellis-Marseglia later said disingenuously.
Her apology isn’t good enough. Neither was Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D-PA) statement on the matter, which asserted there was a “lack of clarity” on the handwritten date matter and that counties were “damned if they did and damned if they didn’t” count the ballots. This is flatly false. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court was clear about the requirements for legal mail-in ballots before the election. Every other county managed to follow the law, and only three heavily Democratic counties ignored it.
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Pennsylvania and other states, particularly California, which still has half a million votes to count, must not be allowed to continue to take weeks to count ballots. Voters don’t trust dilatory election officials, and Pennsylvania’s Democrats justify that mistrust.
Congress should pass a law reasserting one national Election Day, obliging all states to design systems that can deliver results quickly that voters can trust.