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Notes -
Pennsylvania mail-in ballots with flawed dates on envelopes can be thrown out, court rules
This came up when the lower court issued their opinion a few weeks ago. I remember several commentators asking if the fact that it was only filed in two counties was going to have a material impact in the outcome. It looks like it did.
For those of you who leaned one way or the other, how does this impact your future predictions?
On a more specific note - @Rov_Scam, you had some fairly extensive commentary on this case that was interesting and insightful due to your profession. If you have time, would you mind chiming in with an update?
Previous thread here.
Given the extent that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is political and has made political decisions, this is a pretty surprising result to me, if for more cynical causes. Binding parties that were not part of a court procedure is bad, but courts have been pretty willing to put a procedural thumb on the scale toward more votes being counted above all. Whether this ends up the last word, or we have a process change a couple days before the election when all the is are cross and ts dotted, though...
It's especially surprising because there was just an election last year where the Democratic judge was elected on pretty much straightforward partisan electoral lines: Abortion. And he's in the majority on this one.
Looks like there is an ounce of integrity left in that body.
Easy procedural decisions are the ones where a political court is least likely to make a political decision on the underlying merits - the cost of making the legally correct decision is usually low (because the litigant who goofed can often refile, and in any case it doesn't set a bad precedent on the merits) and the cost of making the politically correct decision is high (because it messes up the body of precedent on what should be an easy procedural question, which generates extra work for every judge in the jurisdiction). There is also the possibility that the procedural issue itself has partisan political implications - in fact it almost always does, with left-wing judges favouring civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants. And an appeals court deciding a procedural issue knows that the procedural precedent usually has more impact than the substance of the case at bar.
A good example from the other side is the mifepristone case - SCOTUS decided 9-0 on standing with Thomas' concurrence saying that the plaintiffs lost even harder on standing than the majority - even though Thomas and Alito at least would probably have sided with the plaintiffs on the merits.
This is also why Media Matters stand a better change than you might think of winning on appeal in the 5th circuit if Musk wins the "ads on Nazi posts" lawsuit at trial - the procedural precedent created by allowing an anti-free-speech lawsuit to go ahead in a forum-shopped jurisdiction is on balance a pro-left one and the Fedsoc judges who dominate the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals know this.
While all true, the other three Democratic judges in dissent prove that it's still very easy to just spike the procedural issue and vote your interest, anyway.
Judges often say things in dissent that they wouldn't dream of saying in a majority opinnion. You only have the freedom to throw bombs when there's no risk of actually making a mess of things.
Kind of like how Democrats never pushed for enshrining Roe until it was gone.
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I'm not familiar with the rules in PA but my assumption is the plaintiffs just re-file/amend adding the appropriate parties (all 67 counties). Unless there are some rules I don't understand this is not an insurmountable procedural hurdle. I appreciate wanting to hear a case in the proper procedural posture but this does seem like it's going to come back to them, much closer to the election.
I think it's likely to miss the election entirely if the plaintiffs aren't quick about it.
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I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.
The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?
I don’t think you should be agnostic here. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.
I also don’t think Democrats are categorically against security measures. They are generally opposed for the same reasons Republicans generally oppose gun control. It’s costly, it’s been abused before, and above all, it’s an attack on Our Team.
When I last looked at Texas election policy, I concluded it was pretty reasonable. But the Texas Republican Party has to push harder. They’ve made it a wedge and a sign of party allegiance; anyone who dissents is doing himself no favors. So the party platform (§221) has to be more extreme.
Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?
No, these are designed more like the post-2020 Trump playbook. Spawn enough lawsuits, raise enough red flags, and people will start to doubt the outcome regardless of the facts. If you’re looking for ulterior motives, this is the one.
Also, preferential or ranked voting is literally my single issue. I would vote for Paxton, Trump, anybody if he came out in favor, but no, the party has decided that it’s a threat to democracy. Give me a break. But I understand that most people don’t really care.
I don't see "slower or more difficult" as valid objections to improving vote security. Maybe it should be slower or more difficult? Maybe not, but I would need more information to judge those trade-offs. And it already seems to have gotten slower despite the improvements in technology. Lawsuits aren't always bad. Maybe some are worthwhile? I don't know, I'm just saying that when someone says, "Your system is flawed" and your reply is, "It's the most perfect ever," without probing the suggested issues, is shitty public relations whether or not there are actual problems. And worrying about whose ox gets gored by investigating potential hazards is never going to result in effective systems regardless of who is in charge. That's a Soviet-response to Chernobyl environment in the making. Get it the fuck out of American voting systems, please.
Every election ought to be able to withstand an audit and defend its results, and not just met with a shrug when hundreds of thousands of ballots can't be accounted for or memory cards get wiped or voter rolls don't match or someone just accidentally let thousands of late ballots get counted or all of the vote totals changed in the dead of night after all of the observers were told to go home. The best reply to false or incorrect accusations of vote fraud is to present the accuser with impeccable records that support the result. If your election systems are such a mess due to laziness or complacency that you can't really support the result, it doesn't matter who is accusing you of what -- get your shit in order, or it makes it look like they might be correct when they accuse you of corruption. That is corruption, even if it's a less malicious sort of corruption.
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...he said, standing in front a stack of burning papers...
Ok, Im being facetious, but what sort of evidence to you expect to see, in a system that doesn't to integrity checks, and preemptive steps, that the rest of the world consider basic?
I think we do most of those checks, and that we observe very little fraud anyway.
If there was widespread undetected fraud, I would have expected surprise audits like the Mariposa County report to turn up more of it. I’d have expected more of the Kraken lawsuits to win or at least make it to court. It’s not like they were lacking in motivation!
While I can’t run the statistics on my phone, I get the impression that most of these examples are caught by routine processes. That suggests there’s not much low-hanging fruit.
What specific integrity check would you have in mind?
Partisan scrutineers being allowed to meaningfully inspect the counting process is kind of a big one.
That’s definitely already a thing, no? Pennsylvania, Georgia.
They won't be able to make a repeat of it, but 'because covid', observers were made to keep a 3m distance from the actual counters, and accused of 'making the workers feel unsafe' if they tried to ask about anything in PA for sure. (there was a court case about it, which the RNC or whoever won and got an order to let the scrutineers scrutinize -- once the counting was more or less done)
GA I don't want to relitigate, but "we're stopping counting because of <definitely not a water main break>, you may as well go home" coupled with restarting the count a couple hours later seems well outside the spirit of that reg.
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Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when qualified, competent people make good-faith efforts and are met with good-faith assistance. It may be too cynical but I think any investigation into the 2020 election fails every qualifier: the investigators were not competent nor good-faith, and they would be met with resistance at every possible step anyways.
To be slightly conspiratorial, I'll throat-clear saying the 2020 election was not stolen (though whatever propagandist came up with "most secure election ever" should've been fired and sent to Siberia), but I think there is an awareness that it is not really in anyone's best interest to find that evidence even if it exists (which it almost certainly doesn't). As much as Trace has come to be a disappointment, he's not wrong that right-wing media is even more disappointing and doesn't really care to find evidence (that in this case doesn't exist) so much as grift from the idea of it.
Is there any good reason ballot harvesting shouldn't be banned and treated as a grave offense against the private ballot and the democratic process?
For a few additional comments, a now-deleted account that reported (positively) on performing ballot harvesting in California back at the old abode, a few of my reasons why ballot harvesting is so open to abuse yet wouldn't get reported, and some other guy you might recognize makes offers on what to trade for banning ballot harvesting.
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The deadlines are enforced by the country by stamping the actual time of arrival of the ballots. And they stop taking them on Election Day.
Writing the date on the front is entirely superfluous -- no one reads and no one ought to because.
I'm all for cleaning the rolls, enforcing integrity or whatever, but jeez, find an actually meaningful hill to fight for! Throwing out ballots because a date that otherwise wouldn't matter is wrong doesn't actually advance any of those causes.
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The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat. For example, North Carolina in 2016 had a law overturned combating voter fraud. For important context, the legislature had requested an received demographic information about how voters vote, by race. That is, whether they use provisional voting, early voting, mail-in ballots, etc. The day after the Supreme Court rolled back provisions of the Voting Rights Act the legislature moved forward with a bill over "election security." Said law:
Reduced early voting.
Disallowed SOME but not all forms of alternate photo ID
Removed same-day registration
Removed provisional voting if a voter showed up at the wrong polling place within the same county
Removed pre-registration which allowed teenagers who were below voting age to register, provided they would be eligible to vote on election day
Did NOT require mail-in voters to show ID.
Based on the above bullet points, can you guess which forms of registering/voting were most used by blacks, and which were most used by whites? Hint - the ones which were used primarily by whites were untouched.
Democrats believe that Republican leaders are borrowing a similar playbook in Republican controlled areas, and that "election security" is simply plausible deniability. I agree with that, but I'd add that as a project manager, my philosophy is that a process should be only as complex and restrictive as it needs to be to perform its function, and no more. In other words, something like photo ID is a burden on the process of voting, and justifiable only if it stops a fraudulent vote. If it does not, then the time spent is a waste and should be cut with prejudice. Likewise, if a form of ID is enough to reasonably establish someone's identity, include it.
Those all sound like eminently reasonable election safeguards (possibly except for the in-county restriction, maybe because I live near the intersection of 4 counties; in-state should suffice), and would be easy to comply with for anyone of any race or background, and it seems racist to suggest otherwise. If some communities need to be better educated on election procedures, that does not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, and I'm sure there are organizations dedicated to voter awareness that would be happy to help them.
I don't agree with that.
Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.
Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity. Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time. Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.
Same day registration I don't see as a problem to verify.
Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.
Pre-registration I see literally no way to use for fraud.
If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.
Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?
This is incorrect, and the reasons why are precisely why international election standards focus on consolidating votes received early with strong chain-of-custody measures, but only opening and counting concurrent to election day.
Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security by informing the people who could/would commit fraud that it is either unnecessary (in which case they don't expose themselves to risk), or likely to be needed (in which case they have more time and ability to prepare to act without being noticed, and scale their intervention more carefully). Without the foreknowledge, rigging becomes more prone to obvious abuse, as after-the-fact interventions after delayed revelation are easier to notice and expose due to increased scrutiny on election night and increased reliance on heavy-handed measures (such as freezing counts to insert more ballots before resuming, seizing the records of the talley counts and later releasing unverifiable numbers, and so on).
If you are a party that would conduct election fraud- a position that requires you to have both the interest and the ability to act on the interest with reason to believe you can pull it off (which generally requires already being established and domiannt)- early voting increases your interest (by letting you know you're at risk of losing your positional advantage if you don't cheat) and your ability (by letting you have more time to prepare / act without notice / scale your means of intervention) to cheat.
This is also the reason why long vote-counting periods are bad for election security. Instead of 'taking time to be careful,' it instead allows parties more time to intervene while dragging out public attention and creating more opportunities to act than a shorter time period would.
This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. This is incorrect.
A photo ID is simply a photo tied to a set of credentials, not a guarantee that the credentials are valid for all purposes. Particularly when photo IDs are issued across valid and invalid criteria without distinction- such as a driver's license that doesn't actually address citizenship or registration- various forms of ID, photo or otherwise, have no categorical compliance with voting criteria. If you can use a particular ID to vote, but don't need to be able to vote to get a particular ID, the ID itself has no validating function in whether you should be permitted to vote, even if it is actually you.
And this in turn doesn't approach database correlation. A form of ID may not be registered or applicable to a relevant authentication database in a way that provides appropriate tracking and authentication. For example, a driver's license number can only validate against a database of driver's license numbers. Unless that database is actively set up to also note which elections the person tied to the driver's license is actually enrolled in, it provides no indication that the person is a valid registered voter in the state, because all the database can provide is 'this is a driver's license.' Most voting systems are not setup to provide this, which is why ID is used to verify that someone is an individual, but then the individual is checked against a local roster rather than an ID database.
This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote, or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote, or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote, or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million. This would be incorrect, on all ends.
To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.
This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.
This is absolutely contestable.
This is incorrect, as many systems do not have means or methods to actually check for double voting across jurisdictions, and this is separate from the desire to on the part of those who would need to.
If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases. And if that database does not touch the correct other database that could identify an issue, it still does nothing.
I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.
Like how South Carolina is a ballot harvesting state and thus has a different entrenched political interest setup than non-ballot harvesting states. Or that there might be different legal considerations involved in terms of surviving legal challenges. Or that South Carolina has a significant military recruitment demographic, and so there is a higher than normal socially-accepted basis for significant out-of-state voting.
No? It was an introductory statement which I laid out my reasons for.
That all assumes that voter fraud is reasonably achievable and the only issue is needing more time to adequately prepare. That premise has yet to be established and even if it were, the reaction to that knowledge should be change the process such that they cannot achieve that regardless of having an extra few days.
This is a neat trick of dismissing an opposing argument while missing that it detracts from your own argument. Your argument is that you need to do 2 things in order to vote:
Establish an identity
Establish that the identity is able to vote
Your argument following that is that doing 1 does not do 2. Okay, but the fact that you still need to do 2 has nothing to do with whether or not you've done step 1. They already do check that your name and credentials is registered, so 2 is covered. And even if it weren't, changing which IDs can be used to establish 1 does not change how step 2 is performed according to you. If your argument is that step 2 is insecure, then if the N.C. legislature were truly trying to increase security and not disenfranchise voters it seems like they should have focused on that, no?
You do a bit of a gish-gallop here. I put numbers above to show the 4 arguments, but you only respond to 1.
Doesn't sound like North Carolina is enrolling all drivers to vote, so probably not relevant. And even if it were, automatically registering people when they get a driver's license != registering everyone just because they got a license and not checking eligibility.
Why would it not? And even if not, then the problem isn't with checking the ID.
As with 2, if they aren't even using an ID, then messing with the requirements to use an ID won't fix this.
I threw a semi-random number out there because most people talk about election fraud in the context of Presidential elections. While election fraud should still be caught, election fraud only really has consequences if it changes who/what wins, which it takes way, way more than a single vote to do. You have to commit it at scale for it to achieve anything at all.
What? If the reason it was disallowed was because it was most used by one party, then it absolutely was an attempt at disenfranchisement. That's tautological. Either you can vote or you cannot, and the ID proves your identity or it does not. If a form of ID previously was good enough to prove a person's identity, then I would say the onus is on the people removing it to argue that it's not secure.
Then you'll be happy to know that they literally do go back and check. And they sometimes prosecute people for it if they believe it was intentional.
It was North Carolina BTW. And what you sardonically refer to as mind-reading was the N.C. court of appeals looking at all the actions performed and all the actions NOT performed at the same time, and taking into consideration that the legislature had the data they could use to disenfranchise. They came to the conclusion that their actions lined up too strongly with what a biased actor would do to reasonably assume a coincidence.
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Democrats should get ahead of the game and propose their own voter integrity initiatives. It would be an easy slam dunk to say, "Republicanss don't make elections more secure, but Democrats do." Maybe this trickles out in press releases about unmasking Russian ad campaigns, but it never manifests in having the kind of election procedures that are universal in Europe and Asia.
They apparently do!
It's very bare minimum and the numbers are small, but I was surprised to see this pop up.
Conservatives have been saying this for years, and it was treated as a conspiracy. (The article concludes by noting that it's a state and federal crime to do this, after noting that at least nine people in Oregon have done exactly this. Have they announced charges?)
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The election security procedure that is universal in Europe and Asia but not the United States is public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US because of the large number of races in an American election - it is very unusual for a European election to include more than two or three races, whereas a typical US election includes dozens of state and local races as well as up to three (President, House, Senate) federal ones.
Countries which have complete, accurate and up-to-date lists of resident citizens (i.e. not the Anglosphere) have meaningful citizenship checks to register to vote, and generally require a national ID card (which proves citizenship as well as identity) to be shown when voting. Countries which don't do Papieren, Bitte culture generally have weak voter ID cards which could be defeated with a $10 fake ID if anyone actually wanted to commit retail in-person voter fraud, which empirically they don't. (Postal vote fraud is much easier.) Apart from a few red states in the US, no country without a citizen register requires proof of citizenship to register or vote. (In general, in countries without a citizen register, the only strong documentary proof of citizenship would be a passport)
My browser ate an effortpost on this point, but the fate of ERIC demonstrates that the MAGA activist base is not acting in good faith on election integrity issues, so there is no point in the Democrats trying to co-operate with them or appease them. The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity for it to be a winning issue for either side in the general - the noise about election integrity is there because it is a winning issue in Republican primaries full of Dale Gribble voters.
Your objections are pretty implausible, and then you conclude it's the other party acting in bad faith!
This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.
There are dozens of issues decided in an election at the same time. The median voter doesn't care about the Afghanistan pullout, so it's not important. It's fine if we do it again, because it's not a big deal.
It's there because political machines in the cities magic up tens of thousands of votes in the dead of night, counting ballots implausibly takes days, no other country accepts these processes, and any criticism of the above gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Then, if you try to recount the election, the chains of custody for these ballots are are illegally destroyed, and there's no proof, and then I get to hear from people like you how there's no proof of fraud.
India only have one race per election (rarely two), and they don't try to count overnight - they allow a full day for counting after several days to allow ballot boxes from remote rural precincts to be taken to the counting centre.
In the UK, we don't try to count more than one race overnight. If there are multiple races (e.g. Westminster and local elections on the same day) we count the Westminster election overnight and count the local elections the following day. Three races is about the practical limit for a full-day count - I have attended local counts with three open seats per ward, and London mayoral elections also involve three races (Mayor, constituency assembly member, and PR list assembly member) and in both cases the results come out late in the afternoon. London count the mayoral election on Saturday (polling day is Thursday) to given electoral staff and party observers time to recover from polling day - having done a day's GOTV followed by observing a three-race count the next day I understand why they do this.
Taking the largest state as an example, California had 4 major races in 2020 (POTUS, US House, both houses of the State legislature) and 12 propositions. In 2022 there were 13 major races (scheduled US senate, special US senate, US House, both houses of the State legislature, 7 statewide offices, Board of Equalization), 7 propositions, and 4 judicial elections. Add 2-3 county-level races, 1-2 city level races and 1-2 other races (e.g. school board) and you are looking at an average of about 25 races. Hand-counting that at British levels of efficiency (which are above the global average, and well above anything California could manage) would take about two weeks even if there were no contentious recounts. Americans expect the first count to be complete by the early hours of Wednesday morning, and MAGA are already claiming that delayed counts are evidence of fraud.
To hand-count all races in a typical US election in a one-day daylight count, let alone overnight, would be a bigger commitment of resources to vote-counting than any other country has ever made. There is a reason why the US adopted voting machines long before voting machines that actually worked were available - remember the Florida 2000 "chad" debacle. I'm not sure, but it looks like the US starts using voting machines around the same time that the media starts to expect next-day results. Would it be a good idea? Probably. Is it technically feasible? I don't know. The number of races you can count in parallel is limited by the size of the available count venue and the bandwidth of key senior people who need to review every result before it is announced. You also run out of sufficiently distinct colours of ballot paper. I remember the time the city council election was on blue paper and the county council election was on lilac paper - it caused several hours of delay and the administrator responsible was transferred.
Would convincing the media that they could wait two weeks for the state and local results to allow for a hand count to happen at reasonable speed be a good idea? It depends if it would actually increase confidence in elections. My gut feeling is that in today's America it would not.
Would reducing the number of directly elected positions so that there are fewer races to count be a good idea? Almost certainly in my view, but the argument about whether or not to elect the dog catcher is not primarily about ease of election administration.
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I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.
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While it would be funny I would prefer not to intentionally move faster towards the world where both sides try to mash the defect button as often and as hard as they can.
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This is on the legislature for mandating a feature of the ballot that's not actually useful/used.
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