Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court rules mail-in voting unconstitutional by 3-2 vote
Appeal to PA Supreme Court to overturn ruling is likely to succeed, as Democrat Justices outnumber Republicans by 5-2
There is news about Act 77:
'Pennsylvania's mail-in voting law, Act 77, has been ruled unconstitutional by Commonwealth Court.
The majority opinion from the court's judges ruled that the change should have been implemented via a constitutional amendment.
"No-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient and has been used four times in the history of Pennsylvania. Approximately 1.38 million voters have expressed their interest in voting by mail permanently. If presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted. But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can 'be placed upon our statute books,'" the opinion said.'
https://www.wgal.com/article/pennsylvania-commonwealth-court-mail-in-voting-unconstitutional/38924054
The MSM reports on this ruling are conspicuously silent about the fact that the PA Supreme Court essentially rewrote Act 77 by changing the deadline to count ballots from Tuesday to Friday of the week of the election, and by allowing a ballot with an illegible postmark or no postmark to be counted.
The change in the law that allows a “mail-in" ballot with no postmark to be counted is even more important than it appears at first. In most cities with strong Democratic majorities, the local district attorneys rarely enforce the election laws upon fellow Democrats. There are so many examples of this that it is self-evident to anyone that is paying attention. The same thing is true at the state level. The current state attorney general for PA, Josh Shapiro, had his own name on the ballot in the 2020 election, so he had a very strong incentive to turn a blind eye to voter fraud that would help him win re-election. There was a very clear conflict of interest.
However, if a ballot is mailed with a fake postmark, or if it is part of an act of fraud involving the mail, then the United States Postal Service has both the legal right and the legal duty to investigate. This means that any ballot with a clear postmark that is suspicious is liable to be investigated by the postal inspectors. They are not directly tied to local or state law enforcement, they have their own separate chain of command at the national level. It's much harder for a mayor or governor to make a phone call and "put in the fix" on a case involving the USPS than it is to "fix" a criminal investigation at the local or state level. The USPS tracks the mail very closely to allow them to back-trace lethal items such as letter bombs and anthrax. If they need to prove in a court of law that a ballot was not mailed by the voter whose name appears on the ballot but by a completely unauthorized person, then they almost certainly would be able to do it, as this is exactly what postal inspectors do for a living. By simply removing the requirement to have any postmark on a “mail-in” ballot, the PA Supreme Court removed an entire level of oversight from the system. It's not an exaggeration to state that they deliberately short-circuited the most fundamental safeguard for mail-in ballots: they must be mailed, and the USPS can trace a mailed fake ballot back to its origin to narrow the search for the fraudster. If there is no postmark at all, then the USPS has no jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, the ruling against Act 77 has been appealed to the same PA Supreme Court that has already short-circuited the safeguards written into that law. It is quite likely that they will reverse the decision.
What can be done to fix this?
The state legislature could simply repeal Act 77, but Governor Wolf would almost certainly veto that, and the Republicans most likely won't have enough votes to override his veto.
I have already proposed a state constitutional amendment that requires all mail-in ballots to have a valid postmark, and to be received by the day before election day, and to be counted overnight and have the final tally of mail-in votes released to the public before the polls open on election day.
This still isn't enough. I also propose that every mail-in ballot must be given a serial number that clearly indicates the polling place where the voter would go to cast his ballot. For example, if his city has serial number 01234, and he votes in precinct 5 and ward 6, then the ballot should have the serial number 01234-05-06. This would allow each ballot to be traced back to the precinct and ward where that voter is registered. If this ballot is electronically scanned, which is exactly what happens to paper ballots at the actual polls on election day, then each mail-in ballot can be examined by any official poll worker, or any official poll watcher, for that ward at any time. This allows a million or more mail-in ballots to be broken into small, manageable units of a few hundred per ward that can be traced more easily, in much the same manner that the USPS can trace the address where a ballot was mailed. This adds another layer of safeguards. It would be easy to compare the ballots to the list of registered voters and flag anything suspicious, such as fifty ballots cast by "John Smith" in a ward with 500 registered voters, or 100 ballots mailed from a single address that isn't even in that ward. If more votes are cast than the number of registered voters in that ward, then an audit would automatically be required for that ward. It would make ballot stuffing more difficult and more risky for the fraudsters. Adding this level of granularity to mail-in ballots would go far to keep elections fair, honest and open. If thousands of local poll officials and poll watchers are examining mail-in ballots before and during election day, then they can be an effective deterrent against fraud.
The entire system of poll watchers and workers that was set up to safeguard our polling places was bypassed by the changes made to Act 77. This was a grave mistake. The best guardians of democracy are the local officials who know who lives in their ward, and who doesn't live there, better than anyone else. We must put them back in charge of our elections, including monitoring mail-in ballots, to restore the trust that was lost in the fiasco of 2020.