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Advance warning that PA's vote counting will again be slow, and Trump will again sow confusion [1]

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Date: 2024-09-21

We all know how critical the state of Pennsylvania is to this year’s presidential election. Kamala Harris has a path to victory without the Keystone State, although it would sure be easier for her if she won the state, but Donald Trump has no path to 270 electoral votes without PA. So we should all prepare ourselves now for the fact that we aren’t likely to get the final vote tally in the state for several days after election day, and we already know that Donald Trump will use this delay to sow confusion and doubt about the election results.

An article published this week at Talking Points Memo reminds us that before 2019 Pennsylvania only allowed mail-in absentee voting for a small and specific set of voters, such as those traveling out of state on Election Day. That changed with a new law (Act 77) passed in 2019 that allowed no-excuse, mail-in voting for anyone who requested it. This got tested in 2020 amid the global pandemic, and the share of voters who voted by mail increased from 4% in 2016 to 39% in 2020.

Pennsylvania is one of just a handful of states that does not allow preprocessing (sometimes called “pre-canvassing”) of mail-in ballots before Election Day. Pre-canvassing allows elections offices to do a lot of work to get mail-in ballots prepared for counting, which saves a lot of time when they get counted on Election Day (in PA mail-in ballots cannot be counted until 7:00 am on Election Day). As a result, in 2020 it took Pennsylvania more than a week for overwhelmed elections offices — which were dealing with a huge number of mail-in ballots for the first time — to count all the votes. Since Republicans were more likely to vote in person on Election Day (Pennsylvania does not allow for early in-person voting at the polls) and Democrats were more likely to vote by mail (roughly three-fourths of PA mail-in ballots are cast by Democrats), initial 2020 election results showed an advantage for the GOP, but as mail-in ballots got counted in the ensuing days the tally changed to a Democratic win. This scenario prompted Trump to bogusly claim that this slow change in the final tally was evidence of a “stolen election,” which served to sow doubt with those in the Trump cult.

Sadly, this scenario is likely to play out again in 2024. Over the past four years there have been several attempts in the Pennsylvania General Assembly to fix this problem, but to no avail. A report from the Pennsylvania Department of State released in 2021 stated that “the single most important recommended change to the Election Code is the expansion of the pre-canvassing period.” Earlier this year, the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania House passed a bill to allow pre-canvassing of mail-in ballots starting seven days before Election Day, but the bill has been stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate (big surprise — not!).

If there’s one bright spot in all of this, it’s that some of Pennsylvania’s larger counties have been working over the past several years to get better at processing mail-in ballots more efficiently. They have bought more high-speed processing equipment and fine-tuned their Election Day routines to count more quickly.

Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, expects to produce results on election night. In 2020, it needed most of the next day. Philadelphia expects to wrap up most of its counting this fall within roughly 24 hours after polls close, a task that could be finished by election night if given the ability to process the ballots before Election Day. “That is a very normal practice that happens all over the country,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia. “The fact that we can’t do that in Pennsylvania is what will cause us to not count all the ballots on election night. It is the only cause, and the Legislature could have fixed it.”

There’s one more relatively minor snag with Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots this year: thanks to Republicans’ ongoing voting suppression tactics, mail-in ballots will be mailed out later than was originally planned.

While Sept. 16 is the first date that counties in Pennsylvania must begin processing mail-in voting applications, multiple court cases surrounding the commonwealth’s ballot and when and how they should be counted are still pending. This means that while Pennsylvanians will have their applications processed in September, they likely will not receive a mail-in ballot until October.

So what can WE all do about this? A few suggestions:

First, let’s continue to work like HELL to make sure that Harris and Walz win by a big enough electoral margin that getting to 270 electoral votes won’t all hinge on the vote count in Pennsylvania. That would take a lot of wind out of the sails of Republicans’ voter suppression efforts.

Second, let’s all make sure we’re equipped with the facts about why Pennsylvania will be slow to count all of its votes, so that we can fight back against any friends or family members who might buy in to Trump’s inevitable lies about election fraud in the state on election night.

UPDATE

Thanks to 1BQ for providing an important clarification to what I stated above about voting in person before Election Day in Pennsylvania. Although the state does not have polling places for early voting in the traditional sense, you can go to a county elections office to request a mail-in ballot and then fill it out and submit the completed ballot right there at the office. More information below:

If you are a registered Pennsylvania voter, you have the convenient option of applying for a mail ballot in person at their county elections office, then completing the ballot while there. In one visit, voters can apply for and submit their mail ballot.

When ballots are ready, you can request, receive, vote and submit your mail-in or absentee ballot all in one visit to your county election office or other designated location. Contact your county election office to see if ballots are ready.

With this option, there is no need for mail at all, and you can submit your vote at your convenience.

Where do I vote in person by mail ballot?

You can vote in person by mail ballot at your county election office or other officially designated location. You may drop off your mail ballot in person until 8 p.m. on Election Day, so long as you have applied for it before the deadline. The deadline to apply for a ballot in-person for the 2024 General Election is 5 p.m., October 29 , 2024.

Check your county's website for information.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/21/2271932/-Advance-warning-that-PA-s-vote-counting-will-again-be-slow-and-Trump-will-sow-confusion?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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