Is it big deal if voters drop off more than one ballot?
I expected more people to be fired up about the problem I exposed last week with mail voting violations in Allentown.
I anticipated awakening the “Big Lie” crowd and sending them scrambling for their MAGA hats.
That reaction was minimal and muted, though.
What I didn’t anticipate was that so many people would wonder: “What’s the problem? Why can’t someone put multiple ballots in a drop box?”
“This ridiculous rule needs to change,” one person wrote on Facebook.
No, it doesn’t.
The rule needs to be enforced. Strictly enforced. Starting with the May primary.
Pennsylvania’s mail voting law requires people to deliver their own ballots, whether to the post office or a drop box, for a good reason.
One person, one vote.
Think of it this way.
Your spouse can’t write down the list of candidates they want to vote for and then send you to the poll to cast those votes. I have never heard anyone argue for that. It would be ridiculous.
So, why should you be able to deliver your spouse’s mail ballot to a drop box?
Delivering a ballot is casting a vote. Everyone must cast their own vote.
There is a caveat in the law allowing a disabled person to have someone else return their ballot to the election office — which should apply to drop boxes, too, as they are extensions of the election office.
That’s sensible, because there is a formal process to track it.
Voters who wish to use that provision must submit a form to election officials authorizing the delivery of their ballot by another. That rarely happens. There were only 35 such requests in Lehigh County for last year’s municipal election.
I’m glad the Lehigh County Republican Committee exposed the problem with drop boxes. I hope it sparks change — the manning of drop boxes to ensure the law is followed.
As I wrote earlier last week, the committee reviewed video recordings of people putting mail ballots in the drop box at the Lehigh County Government Center in Allentown on the four days preceding last November’s election.
Committee members counted 1,280 people who delivered a total of 1,587 ballots from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2.
That triggered an investigation by District Attorney Jim Martin. His office reviewed video from all five county drop boxes. The probe concluded that about 7% of people who delivered ballots delivered more than one.
I wonder why so many voters are using drop boxes.
There were 22,029 mail ballots and absentee ballots returned in Lehigh County in last year’s election. Of those, 7,196 were delivered to a drop box.
That’s about one out of every three. That’s way too many.
Drop boxes should be a last resort.
If voters wouldn’t procrastinate, they wouldn’t have to use a drop box. Apply for your ballot early, fill it out and put it in the mail well before Election Day. Even if there are mail delays, it should arrive on time.
Some voters are getting lazy. They’re stretching the mail voting law beyond its limits, and threatening that privilege in the process.
Remember, only a few years ago, we all had to get off our fannies and drive, walk or take a bus to the polls. We had to stand in line to register. Then we had to wait for a voting booth to open.
Now, some people can’t be bothered to put their own ballot in their mailbox, or in a drop box.
A lot of them don’t know better. I get that. Heck, even Gov. Tom Wolf screwed it up last year when his wife dropped off his ballot for him. He volunteered that, without hesitation, during a radio interview.
But ignorance shouldn’t be an excuse anymore.
Mail voting has been in place for three years. Ballots come with instructions. And the rules were hammered home this week after the district attorney’s report.
The delivery of multiple ballots in Lehigh doesn’t mean there was fraud. No one has alleged that individuals filled out multiple ballots.
The system is solid at preventing people from requesting multiple ballots. They can be tracked. If people were harvesting ballots, you’d think that fraud would be exposed when voters whose identities were stolen went to the polls and were told they’d already voted by mail.
And, as one astute reader pointed out to me, someone would be pretty dumb to try to stuff a bunch of fraudulent ballots in a drop box that’s under video surveillance.
But revelations that people are breaking the law when they use drop boxes fuels accusations about fraud. It feeds the frenzy.
Mail voting in Pennsylvania already is in doubt. The state Supreme Court is mulling whether to strike it down.
The law was challenged by a group of Republican state lawmakers and officials, who contend it is unconstitutional. They say changes to the voting process require an amendment to the state Constitution.
If mail voting survives, Republicans will continue to look for reasons to kill it, even though they overwhelmingly supported the law that created it in 2019.
You can bet that will be one of the first priorities for the Republican-controlled Legislature if a Republican is elected governor this year.
So please use the law correctly. Every time we don’t, that adds ammunition to the fight to end mail voting.