Pennsylvania Senate passes election reform bill which includes voter ID
The defortification of the voting system after the 2020 fiasco is slowly but surely moving forward, but still more reforms are needed
On July 8, 2022, the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill by a vote of 28-22 that includes three proposed amendments to the state constitution that would reform the voting process.
The most important change would require all voters to provide identification for both voting in person and for mail-in ballots. A government-issued ID will be provided for free to anyone who does not already have an ID, upon their request and confirmation of their identity.
The second most important change provides for auditing of elections by the Auditor General. If the Auditor General is a candidate for any office in an election, then an independent auditor shall conduct the audit for that election.
The provision that the Auditor General can't audit his own election may be a reaction to a 2020 scandal. The controversy was over the investigation of a truck which was alleged to be filled with up to 288,000 fake ballots. It was transferred from a federal attorney to the state Attorney General, as ordered by US Attorney General Bill Barr. Josh Shapiro, the PA Attorney General, was empowered to investigate his own re-election for voter fraud by this bizarre order.
One interesting aspect of this bill is that Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Governor, is a co-author. Josh Shapiro, who is the Democratic candidate for Governor, was placed in charge of investigating alleged fraud in his own re-election as state Attorney General. This bill transfers the responsibility for auditing elections to the Auditor General and furthermore requires an independent auditor if the Auditor General is a candidate in an audited election. It appears that the Republicans were not amused by the shenanigans of the Democrats during and after the 2020 election, and are creating more safeguards to stop them from doing it again.
The third change would make the nomination for the office of Lieutenant Governor the prerogative of each party’s candidate for Governor, rather than an independent office in its own right with a primary election to choose the candidates. The right to vote, and thereby choose between multiple candidates, for that office in the primary election would be removed by this bill.
The bill has been sent to the House for a vote. If the bill is passed by the House this year, and passed a second time by both chambers in 2023, then these three amendments would be placed on the ballot for approval by the voters in the 2023 primary election. If approved, the state constitution would be amended, and the details would be implemented by legislation soon thereafter.
I support the proposed voter ID and auditing amendments. I do not support the change to the nomination process for the Lieutenant Governorship, as I think that the voters should vote for candidates, rather than allowing each party to choose its nominee. I object to allowing the office to be in effect captured by the parties, rather than open to any candidate. Monopolies are bad, and duopolies are not much better, both in economics and in politics.
We need at least one more amendment. An amendment is needed to require that all mail-in ballots must be requested by a voter rather than mass-mailed without any request, must arrive by 5:00 p.m. on the day before Election Day, and must be counted that night by the officials in each polling place with poll watchers present. It should also require that the tally of mail-in ballots must be reported at the opening of the polls on the morning of Election Day. It should furthermore require that all ballots must have a very clearly legible postmark, in order to allow the US Postal Service to backtrack the origin of any fake ballot that may constitute an act of mail fraud.
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, to make it easy to send it to the right location to have local officials count it. This could be as simple as giving each polling place a unique nine-digit zip code that is valid only for receiving mail-in ballots.
A second, randomly chosen, unique number for each ballot must be created that will allow a cross-check to verify that it was indeed the specific ballot that a specfic voter requested. Any suspected act of fraud involving the mail-in ballots must be reported to the US Postal Service as a possible act of mail fraud. These ballots should be designed to be electronically scanned in the same manner as paper ballots used on Election Day, and run through the same scanners.
If a mail-in ballot exists and the voter shows up to vote at the polling place, then the officials can resolve the problem by showing the voter the mail-in ballot and asking the voter if it is valid. If both sides agree that the mail-in vote has been cast properly, then the voter can't cast a second vote. If the voter disagrees, then he can vote normally, and the mail-in ballot would be disqualified but should be kept as evidence of possible fraud. This should discourage double-voting, and also the creation of fraudulent mail-in ballots.
Finally, if more mail-in ballots are received than were sent out, or more total votes are received than the number of registered voters, then an audit must be automatically triggered for that polling precinct to resolve any discrepancy. The audit must be announced to the public to indicate that a problem exists and to allow the public to share any information that might fix the problem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
In 2020 it was observed that large numbers of votes for one Presidential candidate, and none for another candidate, were reported in the wee hours of the morning in the most closely contested states. Electronic manipulation was strongly suspected to be the source of the vertical spikes in the vote tallies that were reported. If the mail-in ballot tallies are reported at the opening of the polls, then it would become far more difficult to back-fill a paper trail of fake ballots to cover the tracks of this sort of electronic fraud. If each ward or precinct counts the ballots, then it would be very difficult to coordinate such paper ballot fraud to include every single person who works at the polls during Election Day. Local officials, and the poll watchers, are the people who are best placed to recognize fake addresses, or wrong addresses, or too many ballots from a single address that can't possibly accommodate that many voters.
The entire system of poll watchers and workers that was set up to safeguard our polling places was deliberately bypassed by the vast expansion of drop boxes and “mail-in” voting by the Governor and the court system in 2020. The executive and judicial branches of our state governments seized power from the legislative branch, and either ignored or rewrote the laws that they had passed. 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, and with voter ID required for all means of voting, to restore the trust that was lost in the fiasco of 2020.
The name of the bill is Senate Bill 106, and the text is available here: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/billInfo/billInfo.cfm?sYear=2021&sInd=0&body=S&type=B&bn=0106
https://www.meadvilletribune.com/news/pa-senate-approves-constitutional-amendment-proposals-on-abortion-voter-id/article_174f7e13-cafb-54af-8d51-cfbd0df46cb4.html