GOP delivers misguided mail-in voting objections

A Beacon Hill tempest in a teapot? That seems to be what’s brewing at the Republican State Committee’s headquarters.

GOP Chairman Jim Lyons, along with several Republican state lawmakers, assailed the decision earlier this week by the House to extend universal mail-in voting through June.

We’re not certain whether Lyons’ ire centers around the extension, or because it occurred during an informal legislative session attended by three legislators overseen by one of his own, Minority Leader Brad Jones.

The proposal now awaits action by the Senate.

Lyons called the move to advance what he called “controversial” legislation during an informal session a “complete and total disgrace.”

Extending the mail-in option through June has no practical effect, since there’s no election that would warrant its use during that time period.

And as for controversial, the law signed by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker in July is anything but.

The House overwhelmingly passed the compromise measure, 157-1, while the Senate approved it unanimously.

It seems that Lyons — as is the case on many subjects — views this law through a national Republican Party lens, focusing on the perceived role mail-in voting played in President Donald Trump’s defeat.

In Massachusetts, voting by mail, in both the September primary and November general election, was an unqualified success.

While it was no doubt exasperating for Trump supporters to see leads in several battleground states evaporate as votes continued to trickle in more than three full days after Election Day, the blame there lies with the procedures those states used to deal with the unprecedented volume of mail-in votes.

Unlike Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, Massachusetts had already reported the vast majority of its votes on election night.

The difference between the quick turnaround by Massachusetts, Florida and few other forward-looking states revolves around the way they handled the surge of mail-in ballots prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Massachusetts law allowed local election officials to begin processing ballots as early as Oct. 25.

That lead time was crucial to a seamless operation, since the state eventually received 2.3 million ballots through early and mailin voting by our Election

Day.

While city and town election workers couldn’t actually begin counting ballots until polls closed that Tuesday, they could remove mail-in ballots from their inner envelopes and verify names with voter lists, which streamlined the vote-counting process.

But any voting system presents the potential for mismanagement or outright fraud, and sending ballots by mail is fraught with the potential.

As a recent Boston Herald report pointed out, communities had to make huge investments in staffing and training to accommodate the tsunami of mail-in ballots, while the Secretary of State’s office was asked to oversee the process when thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Franklin following the September primary.

That’s why Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin has asked lawmakers to increase his $5.8 million elections budget to $8 million next year to cover the added costs of expanded mail-in voting.

And we also agree with four Republican lawmakers — led by Sen. Ryan Fattman, R-Sutton — who in a letter to House Speaker Ronald Mariano on Tuesday stated, “we owe it to the voters” to further study the mail-in system before making it permanent.

That’s in addition to a formal legislative request issued to Galvin in December to undertake a strengthsand-weaknesses analysis of last fall’s use of no-fault, early mail-in voting.

There’s plenty of time to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the mail-in voting process.

But the evidence so far suggests it’s made a strong case to assume a permanent place in our statewide elections.