The Pennsylvania Election Insurrection

The GOP Senate primary in Pennsylvania is absolutely headed to a recount as only several hundred votes separate Trump candidate and professional medical fraudster Dr. Mehmet Oz from corporate Republican drone David McCormick and suddenly, mail votes matter to the GOP.

In any close race, the trailing candidate, in this case McCormick, needs to find all possible votes to add to the count.

For the candidate in the lead — Oz, in this instance — the goal is the opposite. Oz wants the count to end with him on top.

McCormick will in particular want to count mail ballots: In-person votes have slightly favored Oz, while mail ballots have helped McCormick. (McCormick has won about seven mail votes for every five that Oz has.)

Campaigns can begin fighting over ballots even before the recount would be officially declared next week.

As the final votes are tallied — counties are required to submit unofficial, as-close-to-final-as-possible results to the Pennsylvania Department of State by 5 p.m. Tuesday — county elections officials will be making decisions as to which ballots to count or reject.

During the vote count, elections workers move as quickly as possible to count all the ballots they know they can, setting aside those with any defects for review. The contested ballots create opportunity for both campaigns when they’re adjudicated by county officials.

After two years of expansive mail voting, many of those decisions are largely settled — counties reject unsigned ballots, for example, or “naked ballots” that arrive without a secrecy envelope — but voters create new questions every election. The campaigns can challenge counties’ decisions to count or reject those ballots, and then appeal them to county courts.

Similarly, the campaigns will be able to challenge decisions during a recount, including arguing that the county is misinterpreting voters’ intent, rejecting legitimate votes, or accepting illegitimate ones.

Outside of the county-by-county fight, the campaigns may also opt for statewide litigation, such as by arguing that a patchwork of county policies violates the U.S. Constitution. And one set of lawyers hired by the Oz campaign is also involved in the Lehigh County case, so they could potentially ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block the appeals court ruling.

Both the McCormick and Oz campaigns have been probing the vote-count process, asking counties questions about how they’ve counted votes and how they made decisions about which to count or reject. In Allegheny County, for example, representatives from both campaigns observed the final stage of tallying in-person and mail ballots Friday, and both asked to examine undated or unsigned ballots when county officials reconvene Monday.

Those undated mail ballots have suddenly taken center stage.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Friday that undated Lehigh County mail ballots from last November’s election should be counted.

It did not immediately issue an opinion, but the text of the order, several lawyers from both political parties said, meant counties suddenly could — or perhaps even should — count undated mail ballots.

State law’s requirement that voters date their ballots — which state courts had said meant undated ballots should be rejected — isn’t actually used in determining whether a vote is legitimate, the judges ruled. That makes the requirement a technicality that, if used to reject ballots, violates the Civil Rights Act.

Hicks attached a copy of the order in his email to the county solicitors. As he described it: “The Third Circuit determined that the lack of a voter-provided date on the outside of an absentee or mail-in ballot envelope cannot prevent that ballot’s counting because the lack of that date on an indisputably timely ballot is immaterial under federal law.”

On Saturday, Contres countered that “our campaign will oppose the McCormick legal team’s request that election boards ignore both Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court and state election law and accept legally rejected ballots.”

The fight over mail ballots now puts McCormick in the position of being a Republican defending a voting method that the GOP has spent the last two years attacking. Trump’s lies about election rigging and fraud have pushed Republicans to generally avoid voting by mail. 

 

Trump is already screaming about fraud from his little shit-filled social media sandbox, which means this could be the exact ticket to remind everyone why Republicans are 100% batsit crazy racist assholes.

We'll see who survives this.