Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Despite questions, mail-in balloting ‘a success’
Saturday marked four days since Election Day dawned in Pennsylvania, and the final results showed former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat, as the winner of the presidential election. Counties are still counting votes, partisan rancor is at a fever pitch, and President Donald Trump, a Republican, is contending — wrongly, many would assert — that the results of the state’s election that have pushed Biden to the White House are a sham.
So the question is raised: Should Pennsylvania have altered its centuries-old way of conducting elections, moving from an al
most complete walk-in polling place system of gathering votes to a hybrid of in-person and mail-in voting, in a cycle that was sure to see record turnout and soaring political tensions?
Should the General Assembly and the governor have taken a harder look at the changes that they would impose on the voting apparatus of the state and counties and said, “Why not do this in 2021, when things will be so much calmer?”
Or did the benefits of allowing more people to feel safe while casting their ballots to outweigh the uncertainty and confusion that mail-in ballots have caused the state, leaving the rest of the nation and world looking at photos of ballot counting centers in West Chester, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as Pennsylvania worked to answer the question, “Who won?”
Elected officials and voting activists interviewed since the end of the formal voting process last week, in general, said they believed the decision to go forward with the hybrid plan was a good one, primarily because it gave voters a choice. But they agreed that the roll-out
could have been better than the state’s warring political factions allowed.
State Rep. Danielle FrielOtten, D-155th Dist., of Uwchlan, said she voted against the bill in 2019. But now she is thankful it passed.
“When they proposed the idea and it passed, I thought we had lost our ever-loving mind,” she said in an interview Friday.
To implement such an overwhelming change in the middle of a presidential election with Donald Trump as a candidate “was a big undertaking that I thought would cripple out election infrastructure,” she said. “But thank God we did.”
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the state in March would have left thousands of voters disenfranchised — afraid for their safety if they went to the polls. “I felt like it was divine intervention” to have a mail-in option in place.
Lani Frank, a Democratic voting advocate and former vice chairwoman of the Chester County Democratic Committee, said that even though she voted in-person on Tuesday, she supported the effort to expand voting options with the mail-in ballots. Any delays in announcing results caused by the massive numbers of such ballots were not the fault of the election system,
she said.
“I do not see how anyone could have anticipated COVID-19 when the decision was made to open up the balloting process,” she said.
Chester County commissioners’ Vice Chairman Josh Maxwell agreed.
“In the context of a pandemic, I think it made sense,” he said in an interview. “It allowed people who didn’t want to go to the polls to vote, and in that context, it enhanced turnout. I think that is a very good thing to do.”
F riel-Otten said that despite some “issues” — not being able to pre-canvass ballot envelopes until Election Day, uncertainty over whether ballots received after Nov. 3 could be counted, and warnings about incorrect voting with the mail-in ballots, the system worked.
The state and county, she said, “did a great job. It certainly was not as bad as I thought it would be. To me, it is a success.”
“We all knew it was going to be close, and we all knew we wanted every vote to be counted,” said Maxwell on Saturday. “Hopefully, the state will fix those things that did not work so well” this election.