So I thought I’d clear up some misperceptions about why Pennsylvanians were able to vote by mail this year.
The right wing narrative out there is that if voting in person was good enough for us in the last 100 years, there was no reason for us to vote by mail. It’s unnatural… or something. Frankly, this part of the argument doesn’t make any sense.
Voting by mail wasn’t invented in 2020. OR, WA and CO have been doing it for years. There’s no particular reason why PA had to vote in person. It’s not in the state constitution. If you want to vote in person, go right ahead. It’s like religion. It neither picks my pocket or breaks my leg. If there’s no problem with the legitimacy of a mail in ballot in Portland or Seattle, I fail to see how crossing the Mississippi suddenly makes the process suspect and fraudulent.
In Pennsylvania, there was no early voting allowed in 2016. There was absentee voting and in person voting on paperless voting machines up until 2019. In 2019, the state legislature, majority Republican, passed a bill to allow for mail in voting. Maybe this had something to do with adding paper trails to all the voting machines as well. For whatever reason, Republicans had a brain fart and asked for mail in ballots. I’d heard somewhere that there were some Democrats that were opposed at the time which just goes to show you that troglodytes exist in both parties.
Anyway, the governor signed the bill and that was that. Everyone in PA now has options. We’re all different. We’re all individuals.
Remember, this all happened pre-Covid. Voting by mail was already in the works before anyone got sick.
Right there, there are two reasons why this narrative is stupid.
Let’s skip over the Covid part except to say that it’s a good thing mail in voting was already approved or we might have ended up like Wisconsin with court suits forever forcing Pennsylvanians to vote in person this year. That would have suited the GOP just fine.
So, how did mail in voting become such a clusterf*ck here? Democrats are getting the blame for insisting on Mail in ballots in the first place before it was all sorted out and perfected before a big election.
The reality is that there was a test run during the primary where gaps were identified in the system and were corrected in time for the general.
Who could have predicted that Trump would deliberately sabotage the postal service and disproportionately disrupt on time delivery in the swing states? Probably Adam Schiff could have predicted.
Then the PA legislature, which was all ticketyboo about mail in voting in 2019, suddenly decided that maybe it would be too successful. The governor wanted to start counting the mail in votes shortly before Election Day so we would be able to report our numbers in a timely fashion. The legislature at first agreed to this then someone from the Trump campaign talked them out of cooperating. They counter offered a deal of early counting with a concession on the governor’s part of no drop boxes and allowing poll watchers from other counties to observe the vote. That wasn’t going to work once the postal service slowed down the mail. Without a drop box alternative, millions of mail in ballots could have been held up or “lost”, just like 30000 mail in ballots were “lost” in Butler county.
So, there was no deal. That meant that all of the mail in ballots had to postmarked by 11/3 and no mail in ballots could be counted before then. Not only that but any postmarked ballot received in the three days after the election would need to be sequestered so all of the mail in ballots wouldn’t be thrown out if the Supreme Court decided to intervene. That’s right, thousands of legitimately cast ballots were set aside in case their mere existence threatened the other mail in ballots. It’s insane but that’s what needed to be done to guarantee that all ballots received on or before 11/3 were above reproach.
That’s why we’re in this mess. It could have been easy, Republicans decided to make it difficult and painfully slow.
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Oh, and this just happened:
Followed by this:
Eat a peach and make Stacey Abrams a goddess.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
RD: Regarding our discussion on the PAvoterservices site.
This article in the Morning Call implied to me that how this site is used is up to the county.
I noticed the line about ‘Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors system’ so I googled that and started hunting around and eventually got here. You will have to click the link ‘How can I check my mail ballot’ which shows an illustration which stops after ballot received. I am now more confused than ever, since the article implies (quote below) more status options.
I really hope they decide to fix this system up a bit, but I am not sure suing the Secretary of State is the way to go. I know how I want it to work and I think my idea is reasonable. The status column needs more possible values. At a minimum I would like to see the following:
Vote Received, Vote Legal, Vote Counted. It may be that there are already multiple status values and it is simply a training issue for the county election staff, but I sincerely hope it gets addressed.
I’d let the SOS and Fetterman know. You’re right, it’s confusing. But I feel confident my vote was counted here in Allegheny county. The SOS, Fetterman and Shapiro exude this weird confidence in having closed every possible loophole, know what I’m saying? Who knows what the final vote will be, they just did their best.
Wrote to Fetterman, thanks for the idea