Pennsylvania Mail Voting Law Ruled Unconstitutional

In a party-line decision, a Pennsylvania court ruled against a state law allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail.

The law, known as Act 77, passed the state legislature with bipartisan support in 2019. But on Friday, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled that Act 77 violated the state's constitution. Under the Pennsylvania Constitution, residents must vote in person unless they meet specific requirements.

Despite bipartisan support for Act 77 at the time, some lawmakers in Harrisburg argued that the legislation would endanger electoral integrity by increasing the risk of voter fraud. (RELATED: Biden Casts Doubt on Midterms' Legitimacy if Congress Doesn't Pass Election Reform Bill)

Democrats later took advantage of the expansion in mail-in voting to help President Biden win Pennsylvania by some 80,000 votes.

Although Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court handed Keystone State Republicans a victory, the fight is far from over. Gov. Tom Wolf (D) filed an appeal with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania almost immediately. After his administration filed a challenge, Gov. Wolf's words raised more than a few eyebrows. (RELATED: Dem Senate Candidates Caught Pocketing Money From Convicted Union Boss)

Following the swift appeal to the state Supreme Court, Wolf declared that Act 77 would remain in effect. Of course, Wolf should know that's not how the appeals process works. Filing an appeal sends the question to a higher court. The law remains struck down, barring an injunction.

Wolf's chances of a favorable ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, with its 5-2 Democratic majority, are high. (RELATED: Biden Promises to Nominate First Black Female Supreme Court Justice)

As Hot Air reports:

One thing that caught my attention was the way that the media is still standing shoulder to shoulder in their descriptions of these mail-in voting laws and the reasons they are controversial. The Associated Press quickly described how Donald Trump had criticized the law, “baselessly attacking it as rife with fraud.” The Washington Post offered some coverage of the story, saying that Trump “falsely claimed mail-in voting resulted in election fraud.” There are more examples out there this morning. It's almost as if they sent around a script and everyone was copying from it, right?

In reality, if you want to see the actual results of massive mail-in voting, you need look no further than the 2020 congressional election in New York's 22nd Congressional District. As you may recall, Republican Claudia Tenney retook that seat, but the election wasn't called until the first week of February 2021 and we'll never know for sure who actually won. That confusion was caused by a combination of massive incompetence and, yes, fraud. In a race that was decided by 109 votes, there were literally thousands of votes that election officials could not determine for a judge whether the ballots had been counted once, twice, or not at all. That was just one aspect of the “massive incompetence” part of the problem.

But there was fraud as well, though perhaps not as widespread as people feared. In that district, it was definitely confirmed that ballots from three dead people were received and people were charged for the crimes. And those are just the ones that were caught because election workers recognized the names and had personally known the deceased. In addition to that, just in one county, we know of 54 people who either voted in person or attempted to vote in person after already having cast an early mail-in vote.

There is some voter fraud in every election, though fortunately, it doesn't seem to be as endemic and widespread as some people have feared. But the examples I cited above make it obvious that the more mail-in voting you have, the more the door is opened for dishonest people to try to game the system. How many of them managed it without being caught will likely never be known, but it's a provable fact that this sort of thing takes place. So spare us all of your sanctimonious preaching about “baseless attacks” and “false claims” about voter fraud issues stemming from massive mail-in voting.

According to POLITICO, the State of Pennsylvania received two and a half million mail-in and absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election. More than 1.6 million came from registered Democrats, 586,000 came from Republicans and 278,000 came from independents and third-party voters. (RELATED: Democrats Spend All Day Cleaning up Biden's Election Comments)