Changing views on mail-in ballots

Many years ago, when the Navy stationed me out of state, I voted by mail. Back then my polling place in Chester County used the punchcard type of ballot, so my mailin ballot was surprisingly elaborate. I received a punchcard with hundreds of tiny perforated rectangles (called “chads,” as we learned in 2000), a written ballot explaining which rectangle to punch for which candidate, a little metal prong for poking out the chads, and a piece of Styrofoam to put the punchcard on while poking at it.

I did not vote by mail again until the spring of 2020 when — along with nearly two million other Pennsylvania voters — I requested a mail-in ballot for the primaries. It was early in the pandemic, and voting by mail in our party’s primary seemed both prudent and noncontroversial. By the time the general election rolled around we felt that the election was sufficiently important — and the potential problems with mailin voting appeared sufficiently open-ended — that we decided to vote in person. In retrospect, we probably need not have worried.

During that election, more Pennsylvanians exercised their vote than ever before. This meant that there were long lines at many polls all day long, even though mail-in ballots accounted for 38% of all votes, almost four out of ten ballots.

In ruling that the mail-in ballot provision of Act 77 was unconstitutional last week, the state’s Commonwealth Court has voided a measure that was incredibly popular. Thirty out of 50 Pennsylvania state senators and 138 of 203 members of the state House voted in favor of the law, not to mention the 2,637,065 Pennsylvanians that used mail-in ballots that November.

Act 77 was extremely partisan at the time of its passage, having eight Republican sponsors and one Democrat. Twentynine of the Senate’s 30 yea votes were Republicans and 105 of the 138 House votes were from the GOP.

It continues to be partisan, but now the sides are reversed with the lawsuit concerning its constitutionality being brought by a bevy of legislators who supported its original passage. Further, the bill is now being struck down by a Commonwealth Court whose split decision ran along party lines in perfect accordance with the judges’ party affiliations.

Somewhere around 75% of the mail-in ballots in 2020 went in favor of Joe Biden. It is low hanging fruit for the left to point out that the right’s sudden turn against their own legislation is mere sour grapes. But it should be pointed out that the Democrats, who mustered only one Senate vote and 33 House votes in favor of this measure also have had a sudden change of heart.

Since both sides have now taken turns at being opposed to and in favor of Act 77, let’s set the outcome of the 2020 election aside and look at the merits.

Prior to Act 77, the only excuses for an absentee ballot were absence from one’s municipality, illness, or disability. Left off of that list were people working long shifts, people working two jobs, parents and caregivers struggling to balance work and family schedules, and myriad other reasons that affect voters from both parties. Carving time out to vote and getting to the polls is hard for a lot of people in both parties.

While political differences about the seriousness of the pandemic made Democrats far more likely to avail themselves of mail-in ballots in 2020, the difficulty of getting to the polls has affected voters for years. Act 77 was crafted before anyone saw the pandemic coming because lawmakers saw it as a way to improve voter participation. It would be naïve to assume that the pandemic accounts for the entirety of mailin voting’s popularity.

Squelching the voices of mailin voters might have changed the tide of the last election, but can anyone really cheer when 2.6 million Pennsylvanians’ voices stand to be silenced? I am not a legal expert, so I do not know if Act 77 violates the state’s constitution, and I would certainly not argue that mailin voting could not be improved to address legitimate concerns. But if we deny four out of ten Pennsylvanians their votes just because it would have helped a candidate win the last election then it is not democracy we are trying to protect, it’s partisanship.