HARRISBURG, PA – Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court issued an order on March 1st that will allow the state’s mail-in voting to continue for the time being, overturning a state court’s prior ruling from mid-February.
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Thus serving as another chapter in the legal battle on whether universal mail-in ballots/voting abides by Pennsylvania’s constitution.
Following the request of Democratic Governor Tom Wolf’s administration, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has opted to keep the state’s mail-in voting laws intact while the legality of such law is litigated.
The governor’s administration had cited concerns about the upcoming primaries being overwrought with “voter confusion and the danger of disenfranchisement” if the Supreme Court allowed for mail-in voting to be stalled during the litigation.
With the state Supreme Court ordering that mail-in voting can continue, they reversed the February 16th order from Commonwealth Court Senior Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt, who found that the plaintiffs challenging the law had a strong case.
Going back to Judge Leavitt’s January 28th opinion on the matter, she found that there were indeed state constitutional conflicts regarding how mail-in voting had been practiced over the past two years, citing that while it may be popular with voters in the state, it still requires 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.'”
Republicans within Pennsylvania have been pushing back against the state’s relatively novel mail-in voting and ballot counting practices, which among them allow mail-in ballots to be counted up to three days after an election so long as the ballots were postmarked on the day of the election.
Still, there’s more upcoming in the legal battle, as the rendered order by the Supreme Court is merely an allowance in the interim. The case is slated to land in the Supreme Court on March 8th.
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One wonders how many on the PA SC are driven to this by Trump Derangement Syndrome and thereby discarding the rule of law.