Gov. Tom Wolf notes current systems will stay in place while appeal is pending.
Mail-in ballots are sorted and counted by workers on Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, at Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. A narrow Commonwealth Court majority struck down Pennsylvania’s new but widely-used law permitting no-excuse mail-in voting Friday, arguing that the state Constitution should have been amended before the Legislature made this kind of significant change to voting processes across the state.
The new system was used by more than one in five voters in the 2020 presidential election, and about 1.38 million voters have signalled that they wish to have the option on a recurring basis. In the presidential vote, those mail-in votes skewed heavily in favor of Democrat Joe Biden, giving former President Donald J. Trump an initial platform to raise concerns - with no basis in fact - that the election was rigged.
In her opinion for the majority, Leavitt wrote that the standard for voting since 1838 has been understood in the Constitution to mean in-person voting at a specified time and place. That standard has been expanded over time to permit absentee balloting by military members, the disabled, people away on travel for work or pleasure, and even people constrained by religious observances.
The dissenters in the case, Judges Michael Wojcik and Ellen Ceisler, agreed with the Wolf Administration’s premise that Leavitt’s theory could apply to changes in in-person or absentee balloting specifically, but that nothing in the Constitution bars the Legislature from authorizing a distinctly new form of balloting, which they hold that no-excuse mail-in balloting was meant to be.
But some vote-by-mail supporters argued Friday that having opened this avenue, it would be nothing more than disenfranchisement of voters to take it away. But one top Republican legislative leader said Friday that he believes there are real problems with the way aspects of the mail-in balloting was implemented by Wolf’s Department of State in 2020, and he called Leavitt’s ruling a pivot point for the governor to engage in negotiations on a new elections law.
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