Election reform bill is misguided
Governor Wolf is taking a lot of criticism this week for vetoing an election reform bill passed by the Republicans in the General Assembly. Many of the headlines mention the voter ID requirement in the bill and therefore much of the criticism is focused on that provision.
Looking at it in context, House Bill 1300 is 159 pages long, but the voter ID portion of the bill is only three pages. Three. That is less than two percent of the whole bill. Voter ID is popular. A recent Franklin and Marshall College poll showed that 74% of Pennsylvanians approve of voter ID, so the headline that will move the most paper is about the governor vetoing a popular measure.
But any reasonable reading of the situation might require reading a little deeper and considering whether in the other 156 pages of the bill there were things worthy of the governor’s objection.
The genesis of HB 1300 was the alleged massive fraud committed during the 2020 election. According to the bill’s primary sponsor, Republican Representative Seth Grove, he attended 10 hearings on the election and heard from countless people that elections needed to be fixed in order to restore our faith in Pennsylvania’s electoral process.
But this pretense was severely undercut by Representative Grove himself. When asked about who committed fraud in the 2020 election, Grove replied, “Republicans. But it’s still election fraud. It doesn’t matter who [commits] it. We don’t want that fraud to occur. And to say there wasn’t any is a lie. Now, I will say there’s not like this mass amount of fraud that’s going to shift hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Do not get all misty-eyed over Grove’s altruism. Grove is saying clearly that there was no mass fraud. To put a finer point on it, the fraud that could be prevented by the measures in HB 1300 is almost completely non-existent. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s database of election fraud lists 28 cases for Pennsylvania ranging back to 1994. That is an average of one case per year.
It is worth mentioning that many members who voted to pass HR 1300 also publicly called to decertify Pennsylvania’s November 2020 presidential election results (even though they did not seem to think it was necessary to decertify the state level results that kept them in office based on the same exact ballot counting procedures). Given that Grove and the Heritage Foundation agree that there is no “massive amount of fraud,” the only logical conclusion is that the call to decertify was not fact-based, but politically motivated.
There are election reforms that make sense. In Pennsylvania, elections are administered by county level officers, and the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania (CCAP) has been seeking to reform elections in light of 2020. They specifically mentioned two measures in their June 1 press release: pre-canvassing and extending the mail-in ballot application deadline. The CCAP is made up of commissioners from all 67 counties, only 16 of which are led by Democrats. This is a bi-partisan group, but as a group it much more densely populated by Republicans. Which brings us to the point. HB 1300 had some of the good features that were requested by county election officials and are popular among Pennsylvanians. Wolf cited limitations on dropboxes, mail-in ballots, and voter registration times as obstacles to voting that were included in HB 1300 to which he objected, and he did this well before HB 1300 passed through the assembly.
By including components designed to fix problems that do not exist and which the governor promised would cause him to veto the measure, Republican legislators have placed partisan flag waving above real election reform, squandering an opportunity to effect the actual reforms that people want.
The number of people HB 1300 would stop from casting a fraudulent ballot is literally almost nothing compared to the number of people who would be stopped from casting a legitimate ballot by HB 1300.
If you believe, as I do, that voting is a responsibility, then our elected leaders should be focused on finding ways to make it easier to do, not erecting barriers against a non-existent threat that will make it harder for legitimate voters to fulfill that responsibility.