Which ballots should count? It depends on who they’re for
Because all ballots are timestamped by the County Boards of Elections on receipt, a voter’s handwritten date is meaningless. You might think this argument in favor of counting defective mail-in ballots — in this case, ballots where the voter wrote no date or an incorrect date on the privacy envelope — was made in 2020 or 2021 by a Democratic attorney in a contested general election race.
After all, since Democratic voters use mail balloting more than Republican voters, Democrats will favor counting as many of those votes as possible. And for the same reason Republicans will oppose counting those votes.
But the quotation didn’t come from the Democrats: It came from Republican super-lawyer Chuck Cooper, who is advising GOP Senate hopeful Dave McCormick in his recount against Mehmet Oz.
The institutional Republican Party, for its part, doesn’t like what it’s seeing. Mr. McCormick’s team is making an argument that undercuts every other GOP argument about dodgy mail-in ballots. Worse, that argument might prevail, and set a bad precedent for the next time the party wants to toss such ballots.
If Democrats Summer Lee and Steve Irwin, or John Fetterman and Conor Lamb, or Josh Shapiro and his shadow were in a recount, and one side was getting more mail-in votes than the other, both sides would make the same arguments. The Democratic lawyer whose candidate was losing would argue our democracy depends on including as many voters as possible. The one whose candidate was winning would argue democracy depends on careful adherence to the rules.
This is the rough-and-tumble nature of democracy. Deciding who votes, and which votes count for how much, is part of the process. It has always been about gaining a partisan
advantage at least as much as about the grand principles of democracy.
But there was a time when those principles really did mean something — when extending the franchise to Black Americans and women really was about perfecting the union, and not (at least primarily) about enhancing one side’s chances against the other.
Now these principles are pieces of ragged rhetoric to be used as needed in order to score transparently partisan points, and ignored when they make points for the other side. It’s dangerous, to say the least, when the people charged with protecting and preserving the principles of democracy treat them so shabbily. They only encourage voters to cynicism and disengagement.
In the case of misdated ballot envelopes, we agree with Mr. McCormick, Mr. Cooper and the Pennsylvania Department of State: They should count. We know the ballots arrived on time. A voter’s understandable mistake should not invalidate the vote. We’d be grateful if a high court resolved this question once and for all, so we don’t have to deal with humiliatingly, dangerously unprincipled arguments about it every few months, forever.