Fixing Pa. mail-in vote glitches goes down to wire

HARRISBURG » With barely three weeks to go before counties can begin mailing out ballots, lawsuits are filling the vacuum of action to fix problems or ambiguities with Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting laws after a primary election that saw record-smashing numbers of mailed-in votes amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Closed-door talks between Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration and lawmakers are showing little signs of wrapping up and, if anything, more signs of disagreement than agreement are emerging in the shadow of a highstakes See Second Dem lawsuit presidential claims USPS changes

campaign in the battleground will harm mail voting. state.

The list of wants is long and there are a lot of parties at the table, including the two major political parties, the counties and President Donald Trump’s campaign, which filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking in part to outlaw the use of drop boxes for mailin ballots.

“There’s a lot of gorillas in the room, but I think the biggest gorilla is to get our arms around pre-processing ballots before Election Day,” Rep. Garth Everett, R-Lycoming, who chairs the committee that handles election issues, said in an interview.

The talks also come against the backdrop of U.S. Postal Service warnings that it cannot guarantee mailed ballots will arrive on time to meet the narrow time frames Pennsylvania and many other states allow to request and return those ballots.

Still, Republican lawmakers, who control the House and Senate majorities, are generally unwilling to discuss the specifics of the talks with Wolf, a Democrat, or to sign on to the changes sought by Wolf and his Democratic allies in the Legislature.

Nothing will pass without a bipartisan compromise, and lawmakers pin the first week of September as the latest that something should pass, to give counties time to work it into their plans for the Nov. 3 election — when more than 6 million Pennsylvanians are expected to vote.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D