DV Journal

With the election less than a week away, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in favor of a Republican bid to keep improperly cast ballots from being counted.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), the state Republican Party and the National Republican Congressional Committee filed a lawsuit last month asking the high court to require ballots without the correct date and any date not be counted. The move was in response to acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman’s guidance to county election departments to count those flawed ballots, despite an order from the U.S. Supreme Court prohibiting it.

Chapman sent a directive to county election officials saying the high court’s order was “not based on the merits of the issue.”

“It provides no justification for counties to exclude ballots based on a minor omission, and we expect that counties will continue to comply with their obligation to count all legal votes,” Chapman wrote in that directive.

“This ruling is a massive victory for Pennsylvania voters and the rule of law,” said Ronna McDaniel, RNC chairwoman. “Following an RNC, NRCC, and PAGOP lawsuit, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has made clear that incorrectly dated and undated mail ballots cannot be counted. Republicans went to court, and now Democrats and all counties have to follow the law: this is a milestone in Republicans’ ongoing efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania and nationwide.”

According to state law, voters who use mail-in ballots are required to follow rules that say those ballots must be signed and dated on the envelopes. However, the court’s brief ruling said it was divided on the question of whether throwing out the ballots violates federal law. The court ordered Pennsylvania county boards of elections to “segregate and preserve any ballots contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes.”

Speaker of the House Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster) and House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R-Centre/Mifflin) issued a joint statement:

“Dates matter, and the dating of important documents has been a critical tool in officiating the legality of documents for centuries. We thank the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for re-confirming what we have said all along: Pennsylvania’s election law is undeniably clear that mail-in ballots and absentee ballots must be correctly dated to be valid.

“We are also glad to see the Pennsylvania Supreme Court order that incorrectly dated or undated mail-in ballots and absentee ballots should be segregated, something we requested the Pennsylvania Department of State advise counties to do weeks ago.

“Today’s decision is not only a win for the plain language of Pennsylvania law, but also for upholding the security and integrity of our elections,” Cutler and Benninghoff said.

Pennsylvania is one of the most-watched states, with the hotly contested race U.S. Senate race between Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz and Lt. Gov John Fetterman, a Democrat. It could determine control of the Senate. While Fetterman had been leading for several months, a Muhlenberg College/Morning Call poll released Tuesday showed the race is now tied.

The RNC is involved in 75 cases of election integrity litigation in 20 states this cycle. This latest victory follows other recent legal wins, including winning a lawsuit against Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for restricting the rights of poll challengers.

And winning a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ attempt to restrict the rights of poll watchers.

Chapman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, she did publish an op-ed warning the results of the 2022 midterms might not be known for a few days after the election.

“While we would all like to go to bed on Election Night knowing who won in every race, it will likely take a few days for complete unofficial results,” Chapman wrote.

“An accurate count is paramount and cannot be rushed. County election workers must be given a reasonable amount of time to do their jobs and follow the law. That short interval of time will not be because anything nefarious is occurring; rather, it simply means that the careful, deliberative process and timeline prescribed by Pennsylvania’s Election Code is at work to achieve a thorough count of every eligible vote.

“It takes time to count more than 1.3 million mail ballots. And current election law does not permit counties to begin pre-canvassing these ballots until 7 a.m. Election Day,” Chapman said.

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An organization that defends election integrity says the City of Philadelphia isn’t doing enough to protect the election system from fraud, and it has gone to court to make its case.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) has filed a lawsuit against Philadelphia’s city commissioners demanding that poll workers be trained to prevent duplicate votes from being counted. Every one of those ballots, the group argues, cancels a legitimate ballot cast by a law-abiding voter.

In a press release, RITE said the commissioners are “threatening to discontinue critical, commonsense, and legally required election integrity measures that safeguard against duplicate voting. According to a recent report, the justification for this shocking conduct is officials’ unjustified belief that identifying and eliminating duplicate votes somehow jeopardizes their ability to access state election administration funds. The commissioners, who were recently caught deceiving the public regarding the distribution of absentee/mail-in ballots, have ignored RITE’s repeated attempts to correct this misunderstanding of the law, threatening to conduct the 2022 election without these crucial security measures in place.”

The lawsuit asked the court to require the commissioners to conduct a basic audit of the ballots at the conclusion of the election, known as a poll book reconciliation. That matches absentee and mail-in ballots received against in-person votes.

“This simple process identified 40 such duplicate votes during the 2020 election in Philadelphia, and it is becoming increasingly important as absentee/mail-in voting grows more popular in the city and throughout the state,” the organization said. “The lawsuit also challenges Philadelphia’s inadequate training and checks at the polling place on Election Day, which, if done properly, would further reduce duplicate voting opportunities.”

Philadelphia election officials declined to respond to requests for comment.

“As reports of election abuses in Philadelphia continue to come to light, Pennsylvania voters deserve to know that local election officials are doing all that they are required to do to prevent and eliminate duplicate voting,” said Derek Lyons, RITE’s president, and CEO. “Just weeks before the election, however, officials appear determined to weaken crucial election integrity measures without any justification. Duplicate voting is antithetical to election integrity. RITE is proud to support Pennsylvania voters fighting against this flawed, dangerous, and illegal plan that would undermine the public’s trust and confidence in their elections.”

Joshua Voss, the attorney who filed the suit, said, “Election officials must protect the ballot box from duplicate voting that can occur when someone votes by mail and then later votes in person. Unfortunately, even as mail-in ballots have become more popular, Philadelphia officials have suggested they might weaken safeguards against double voting that have proven effective in the past. Our lawsuit seeks to defend the integrity of Philadelphia’s elections by ensuring that robust protections against double voting remain in place, as required by law.”

Albert Eisenberg, a Republican consultant with RedStateBlue, said that while he does not know the specific details of the lawsuit, “there absolutely needs to be more oversight on the absentee voting, drop-boxes, etc. in Philadelphia so people of all political backgrounds trust our elections. Open drop boxes with no supervision are a bad idea in a first-world democracy.”

Eisenberg added, “I believe (Senate candidate) Dr. Oz will be the first Republican in generations to get to 20 percent of the citywide vote in Philadelphia due to John Fetterman’s radicalism and a growing alienation among working Democrats toward their party’s main priorities, which are all related to social issues as life gets more expensive–and dangerous–for Philadelphians.”

Co-founded in 2022 by Steve Wynn, Karl Rove, and Bobby R. Burchfield, RITE is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the rule of law in elections.

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With only weeks until the important midterm elections, the acting secretary of state ordered counties to disregard a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court requiring mail-in and absentee ballot envelopes to be signed and dated.

On Oct. 11, acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman sent a directive to county election officials saying the high court’s order was “not based on the merits of the issue.”

“It provides no justification for counties to exclude ballots based on a minor omission and we expect that counties will continue to comply with their obligation to count all legal votes,” Chapman wrote in that directive.

The state and national Republican committees, along with some voters, are crying foul.

They filed a “King’s Bench” lawsuit asking the state Supreme Court to order Chapman to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s order.

In a joint statement, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer, and Pennsylvania GOP Chairman Lawrence Tabas said, “As the Pennsylvania legislature and U.S. Supreme Court have made clear, undated mail-in ballots should not be counted. Republicans are holding Pennsylvania Democrats accountable for their brazen defiance of the (U.S.) Supreme Court and the rules duly set by the legislature. Pennsylvania Democrats have a history of election integrity failures and Pennsylvanians deserve better: this lawsuit is the latest step in Republican efforts to promote free, fair, and transparent elections in the Keystone State.”

In May 2022 the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled ballots with undated envelopes should be counted. The issue stemmed from the close Republican primary that resulted in a lawsuit between Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.

The 3rd Circuit panel held that handwritten dates on the envelopes do not affect voters’ eligibility. Also, that court ruled voters’ civil rights would be violated if their ballots were tossed due to the omission of a date.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that finding and upheld Pennsylvania’s election law as written.

The mail-in ballots have been a bone of contention since Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed a law, Act 77 that permits no-excuse absentee ballots. While the legislature passed that law with a bipartisan vote, many Republican lawmakers now believe it should be changed, especially since former President Donald Trump blamed mail-in ballots and drop boxes as part of the reason he lost the state of Pennsylvania to President Joe Biden in 2020. However, court challenges to Act 77 have failed to overturn that law, which remains in place.

Wolf appointed Chapman as acting secretary in January. At that time, former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, decried her as someone too partisan to be confirmed by the legislature. Chapman had previously worked for Deliver My Vote, which is nonpartisan under the tax code; McSwain noted its “founders are on record saying they are pushing mail-in voting to help Democrats” get elected. Deliver My Vote promotes mail-in balloting that “specifically favors Democrats,” said McSwain.

The GOP suit asks the court to order counties to segregate any undated ballots from ballots filed correctly. While some counties plan to do that, others do not which would result in “unequal treatment” of voters, violating the constitution.

“Any counting of ballots that the General Assembly has declared invalid—and the lack of statewide uniformity in the treatment of undated or incorrectly dated ballots—are eroding public trust and confidence in the integrity of Pennsylvania’s elections at a vital moment in the nation’s and the Commonwealth’s history,” the suit said. “The court therefore should take immediate action to uphold the General Assembly’s date requirement and to set aside the secretary’s invalid guidance.”

Liz Preate Havey, chair of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, said Montgomery County will segregate ballots with errors.

“It just leads to more and more distrust. We do have these drop boxes where we’ve seen time and time again, we have video, where over 100 people doing multiple drops in one election cycle. We’re just asking for reasonable election integrity measures to be in place,” said Havey.  If there is a problem with someone’s mail-in ballot, they can go to their polling place and vote by provisional ballot.

“The Bucks County Board of Elections will segregate ballots arriving in misdated and undated envelopes. Those ballots will be included in reported vote totals, but will be scanned separately so those votes can be subtracted if necessary,” said a county spokesman.

James Allen, director of Voter Services for Delaware County said, “We will handle this the same way we did during the Primary. We will process the ballots from undated envelopes in a separate batch, so that if we receive yet another court ruling or different guidance from the Department of State, we would have the option to back out that batch.”

“It’s still too early to give a definitive answer on how Chester County will proceed.  The Board is considering the status of the law in Pennsylvania and will make a decision soon,” said Rebecca Brain, a spokeswoman for the county.

Republican Guy Ciarrocchi, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Berks/Chester), criticized her for a voter education town hall with Chapman that Houlahan held on October 13.

“The chief elections’ official in Pennsylvania has defied the US Supreme Court—and, then directed every county join her in defiance. She then spoke at the Houlahan town hall—essentially a campaign event. Chapman has failed in her primary duty—to be an impartial election official to instill trust.

Houlahan has shown bad judgment in using taxpayers’ money for the event—and, compounded the error by having Chapman speak at her town hall. Sadly, Houlahan continues to act like a partisan politician; not the bipartisan problem solver she alleges in her ads. Actions speak louder than words,” Ciarrocchi said.

Houlahan’s campaign spokesperson, Shane Wolfe said, “This criticism is not only wrong on the merit, but seems to come from a place of misunderstanding the job of our public servants. The town hall had absolutely nothing to do with politics or campaigning. It did have to do with public servants doing their jobs to make themselves available and inform the public — regardless of party affiliation — about how to safely and securely exercise their right to vote. If election officials should not answer these questions now, when voters have questions, when should they?”

In a press release after the town hall, Houlahan said, “Representing a purple community means educating all community members, regardless of political affiliation, on how to cast their ballot. Last night, we had a straightforward conversation about the voting process and answered questions on a wide range of concerns. I will continue to share resources with all constituents who reach out, and I encourage all eligible Pennsylvanians to exercise their constitutional right to vote.”

Chapman did not respond to requests for comment.

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County election officials are registering their displeasure with the Pennsylvania Department of State (DOS) over a proposed form that would combine voter registration with a request for a mail-in ballot, according to letters obtained by Broad + Liberty. Both letters are embedded at the end of this story.

The development is just the latest in the continuing fallout from Act 77, the massive election reform Republicans passed in 2019 and have since largely turned against, and that Democrats initially opposed but have now embraced. The law greatly expanded voters’ ability to cast an absentee ballot, and ushered in no-excuse mail-in voting across the commonwealth.

Currently, voter registration forms and mail-in ballot request forms are completely separate. According to the letters, combining the two elements into a single form would create confusion for the voter and election workers, and would almost certainly lead to lawsuits from various political campaigns.

Dauphin County sent a letter to the DOS on Friday, while a letter from Bucks County is undated but could only have been written and sent after Aug. 10, given certain references made in the letter.

“We believe this proposed form is likely to stoke new and undue confusion, concern and skepticism among voters at a time when it is imperative that we rebuild trust in our election system,” Bucks County Elections Director Thomas Freitag wrote, in bold.

The Bucks County letter also alleged that the Department of State didn’t inform counties of the proposed “combined” form until about three weeks ago on July 29.

Freitag said in his letter that as county election officials from across the state began to discuss the idea, the “consensus against this move was so resounding that a workgroup was formed to provide meaningful feedback to the State regarding this combined form.”

Dauphin County Elections Director Gerald Feaser Jr. echoed those concerns while emphasizing that he has been “unequivocal” in his support of other online processes for someone to request an absentee or mail-in ballot.

“However, this dramatic change in front-line service of voters with a dual registration/mail-in ballot application so close to a potentially pivotal election is a terrible idea. My concern is based on my experience — and the shared experience of the other 66 election directors across Pennsylvania — since Act 77 of 2019,” Feaser wrote.

“It has been clear from the outset that this idea was developed in a vacuum,” Feaser added.

Both Feaser and Freitag said the biggest concern was that the two different “requests” on the form had different statutory deadlines.

“[W]hat do I do if a voter registered in another county submits one of these dual applications changing their address to Dauphin County, but it is received on Oct. 25, which is after the deadline to register or make changes to a voter’s’ status, and they are requesting a mailed ballot at the same time?” Feaser asked. “Do I set it aside as received after deadline? Do I forward it to the county in which they are presently registered to vote and hope that the county decides to issue a mailed ballot for the voter’s current election district in that county but mail it to the voter’s new address in Dauphin County?”

Feaser said a new round of frustrations would mean more disenfranchised voters, not fewer.

“We were flooded with duplicate applications, and irate voters who received a mail-in ballot for the 2020 election who wanted to vote in person and were forced to cast a provisional ballot,” Feaser also told the Department of State. “We lost large numbers of poll workers because of the threats and anger directed at them by voters who became permanent mail-in voters in error. By rushing this form through, without putting in place appropriate safeguards, the Department is putting political interests ahead of the safety of Pennsylvania’s election workers.”

Feaser went so far as to say that the combined form was likely causing the Department of State to take its eye off of other, higher-priority tasks needed for the November election.

“What we, as counties, presently need from the Department is a list of candidates and SUREVote candidate codes to facilitate election night reporting so that we can complete ballot preparations to mail ballots to voters by mid-September,” Feaser specified.

The Department of State did not return a request for comment.

Act 77 has been a political battleground ever since its implementation, and to see how unsettling it has continued to be, one must look no further than the dispute over the requirement that the outer envelope containing a mail-in ballot be dated by the voter.

That dispute led to several court cases, and on Friday, a state court judge ruled that undated ballots must be counted. But that ruling was only one of several, as the battle over this particular provision of the law had been heard at least twice in federal courts, and numerous other times in state courts.

Republicans and Democrats agreed on some election-reform compromises last month as part of a larger negotiation towards passing a state budget. Among some of the reforms, for example, Republicans got their wish to eliminate any potential third-party funding of county election offices, which had become controversial in the 2020 election. To counteract that, Democrats got $45 million to dole out to county election offices in grants to help upgrade equipment and other needs.

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22159292/letter-to-acting-secretary-chapman-wm.pdf

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22159291/dauphincountyletter08192022-wm.pdf

This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Tuesday upheld the no-excuse mail-in ballot law, overturning a previous decision by the Commonwealth Court ruling Act 77 was unconstitutional.

In a 7-2 decision, the high court held the state legislature had the power to write election law, which changed a longtime process in Pennsylvania that had required voters to give a valid reason when they wanted to vote by absentee ballots. It also led to ballot drop boxes, which critics have complained brought ballot-harvesting, where people illegally turned in numerous ballots.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is the Democratic candidate for governor, welcomed the decision.

“With this ruling, the court has provided certainty to voters — certainty that however people cast their vote, in person or by mail, it will be counted. After two years of consistent attacks on our election system and our voters, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated loud and clear that Act 77, which modernized our election code, is constitutional,” said Shapiro. “We must continue to stand up to attacks by those who want to pick and choose the laws to follow and the votes to count.”

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, the Republican running for governor, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Wally Zimolong, a lawyer involved in the case said, “We are disappointed by today’s ruling. It is an outcome-based opinion used to justify overturning 160 years of judicial precedent and redefining the phrase ‘offer to vote.’ We believe that we made a clear, concise, and constitutional argument that permitting mail-in ballots required a constitutional amendment. The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania agreed with our position and, unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not. This is also a reminder that elections matter and changes to Act 77 must be made at the ballot box.”

During a recent DVJournal podcast, longtime GOP political operative Michael Caputo also made the case that the state Supreme Court is playing politics and ignoring the clear language of the law. “We’re going to go through the midterms, I think, with no-excuse mail-in ballots because it took so long for any effective legislative fix. Act 77 needs to be repealed entirely,” Caputo said.

Linda Kerns, a Philadelphia attorney who handles election law cases, said, “Justice (Kevin) Brobson’s dissenting opinion boiled it down to, ‘The majority overruled 160 years of this Court’s precedent to save a law that is not yet three years old.’ I found it peculiar, as did Justice (Sallie) Mundy in her dissent, that the majority spent so much time discussing the so-called popularity of the law and who voted for it or signed it. None of that has anything to do with whether it should survive a challenge under the Pennsylvania Constitution.

“Until now, our Supreme Court has consistently placed a check on the legislature when they tried in the past to expand voting by means other than in person,” Kerns said. “Based on its other election-related decisions, I am not surprised by this ruling but I believe that the Court failed Pennsylvanians in what appears to be a zeal to protect no excuse mail balloting, whatever the cost,” Kerns said.

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A Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the signature requirement of Act 77 –the 2019 law that gave Pennsylvania no excuse, mail-in ballots– may have triggered a “non-severability clause” in that law invalidating it.

The result, say Act 77 opponents say, could be, “Bye-bye ballot boxes.”

That is state Rep. Seth Grove’s premise in a July 12 letter he wrote to Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Leigh Chapman. Grove (R-York), chair of the House Governmental Affairs Committee overseeing elections, noted that if any section of Act 77 is ruled invalid, the remainder of the law is also invalid.

“Non-severability clauses are an important tool of the General Assembly in ensuring the legislation it enacts will be applied in a way consistent with the legislature’s intent when considering and approving the legislation,” Grove wrote. The section shows “it does not intend for the individual provisions of the law to stand on their own.”

Chapman did not respond to Grove’s letter, nor did her spokesperson respond to the Delaware Valley Journal’s request for comment.

During a Tuesday press conference, Grove noted problems with how Pennsylvania’s elections have been conducted in the past two years. Grove has released reports on the general elections of 2020 and 2021 and most recently the 2022 primary entitled “Missed Opportunities and Continued Chaos.”

“Today is July 19, 2022, over two months from the May 17 primary election. We still do not have a certified 2022 primary election,” Grove said.

“On June 30, 2021, Gov. Wolf vetoed HB 1300 without reading it or understanding the provisions contained in it. Further, his administration had refused to even discuss election changes,” Grove said, noting that a bipartisan bill would have gone a long way toward improving Pennsylvania’s elections. A new version of that law remains pending in the legislature.

“Regardless, House and Senate Republicans sent the governor sweeping election changes addressing three major areas of elections: increasing voter access; providing integrity and security in every process; and modernization.

“To date, our elections have been anything but smooth,” Grove said. “This report highlights repeated election failures, which have been categorized as ‘smooth elections’ by Wolf administration secretaries of state.”

He added, “Ask thousands of Montgomery County voters if receiving wrong ballots in the mail is ‘smooth.’ Ask candidates in Montgomery County who went to bed thinking they won and waking up losing because they, the press, and residents didn’t know…thousands of sequestered mail-in ballots existed and were sequestered because of errors.

“Ask Bucks County voters if elections are ‘smooth’ after the Board of Election had to sequester ballots because of illegal voting at drop boxes, which delayed returns. Ask Lehigh County voters if there are smooth elections after DA Jim Martin verified hundreds of illegal votes were cast in their local elections using drop boxes.

“Ask Election directors if our undated ballot soap opera created ‘smooth elections’ or the reality the last court ruling by the Third Circuit Court invoked the non-severability clause of Act 7,7 making those provisions void. Ask voters if they have ‘smooth elections’ when we had to threaten two different county Boards of Election with impeachment because they voted to violate the election laws,” Grove said.

Grove added, “We can’t continue with what has occurred in the commonwealth. Our voters are demanding change. Our election administrators are demanding change.”

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After being in the ring for months with all the candidates, countless surrogates, and many election officials, I have come to some clear conclusions about what needs to be done on the Republican side in races for the U.S. Senate and governor in Pennsylvania.

The first thing that needs to be fixed is the process for counting votes in Pennsylvania races. We have become the laughingstock of the nation. Urgency is not the watchword of the people in charge of counting votes in most counties. I realize that Pennsylvania Act 77, which paved the way for the mail-in ballot nonsense, needs to be repealed. I know that Josh Shapiro, the Democratic Party nominee for governor, would veto any attempt to rid us of this current cumbersome and possibly corrupt system.

So, we must allow counties to count mail-in ballots a few days before Election Day. But we should also tighten the deadlines that they face to get all votes counted. For example, the current deadline of getting votes counted in the recount vote process of June 7 for the May 17 primary is offensive.

Each day that goes by without a resolution weakens confidence in the validity of our elections.

Second, I believe it is time for Dave McCormick to drop all the lawsuits he has filed arguing that mail-in votes received without a date written on the envelope by the voter should be counted. I have grown to respect and like McCormick during our nearly weekly interviews over the course of the campaign. But his lawsuits following a Commonwealth court’s ruling saying that mail-in ballots without a date should be counted are playing right into the hands of people like national Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who are trying to weaken any restrictions on the counting of mail-in ballots.

I understand McCormick fought a very hard race against Dr. Oz and spent probably $10 to $12 million of his own money, but the recount should be his last action in this election. I’d like to see him named chairman of the Pennsylvania GOP and I’d like to see him become the nominee for the upcoming Senate race against Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. I believe Casey has essentially coasted on the family name and is very beatable.

It is also clear to me that election integrity is a critical issue with Pennsylvania voters. However, I don’t think the Republican nominee for governor state Sen. Doug Mastriano, is approaching it in the right way. His rantings about voting machine conspiracies and his suggestion that as governor he could overturn election results in the 2024 presidential race are not a statewide winning strategy. I like that he is talking about the importance of the Secretary of State’s Office in running elections and I’d like to hear him flesh out the types of people that he would consider for the office.

I’d also like to see Mastriano engage with more media outlets rather than just that small number that seem to amplify some of his more radical views. He refuses to come on my show–and much of talk radio in the state–apparently because he can’t any kind of challenge even from conservative hosts.

His decision to hang up the phone during an interview with DelawareValleyJournal.com is a prime example of a strategy that will fail.

The bottom line is I think Dr. Oz is the presumptive Republican nominee for the Senate and I think he can beat John Fetterman. Doug Mastriano can beat Josh Shapiro, but he must make some big–but doable–changes.

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Election Integrity activists have led the attack on Pennsylvania’s current voting law and, specifically, they want its validation of no-excuse absentee ballots to be eliminated.

Regardless as to whether Senate candiate Dave McCormick’s electoral challenge will salvage his political effort after a recount, his lawsuit must be supported, for it provides a shortcut to kill Act 77.

In January, the Commonwealth Court ruled Act 77 was unconstitutional, reasoning that I vigorously supported.

Yet, this issue is stuck in the PA Supreme Court, probably due to “politics” because its Democrat-majority can’t discern a cognizable method to refute these analyses.

Recently, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it’s “immaterial” that the outside envelope of an absentee ballot be dated; its timely return could easily be validated by noting the postmark and confirming the date when it had been received by the county election officials.

This mandate is in Act 77:  “Section 1306.  Voting by Absentee Electors.–(a)  … The elector shall then fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on such envelope.”

Pivotal is its non-severability clause:  “Section 11. … If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remaining provisions or applications of this act are void.”

Litigating this via the federal court precludes the ability of the Pennsylvania Supremes to be dilatory when faced with an obvious glitch in the law; it’s doubtful that the SCOTUS would intervene when the lower court had already ruled.

This is black-letter language that seemingly provides no legal wiggle-room. Thus, dumping Act 77 “ab initio” [from the date when it was signed] would invalidate non-excuse absentee voting.

Some people enjoy the convenience of mail-in voting, but they ignore the traditional reasons for functioning as citizens and the unnecessary introduction of fraud in the absence of voter/photo-ID.

This has been the cause célèbre of electoral reform advocates, for it carries profound implications.

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One issue that has risen to the top in this election cycle is Pennsylvania Act 77. This act was supported by many Republicans when they agreed to essentially remove any requirement to be able to vote by absentee ballot in exchange for taking away the ability of voters to vote a straight party vote at the flick of one button on election day.

Democrats essentially turned the removal excuses for absentee ballots into the ability to vote by mail in Pennsylvania–no reason required.

State Senators Doug Mastriano and Jake Corman are two of the candidates in the Republican primary for the governor’s race. They have tried to spin this misjudgment by saying Democrats distorted the intentions of Act 77 and gave us the current system that many people believe is much more open to ballot harvesting and election fraud.

In addition to mail-in ballots, Democrats in Pennsylvania approved a drop box system across the state that allows people to deposit ballots that they receive in the mail into secured boxes across the state. The law on this requires that a person may deposit only their own ballot.

On April 4, Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin issued a report that indicated that at least 288 people deposited more than one ballot at five area drop boxes between October 18th and election day, November 2, 2021.

On my radio show, Martin told me that he declined to prosecute anyone because only a few of the 288 people could be identified due to the mask mandate at the time and the poor quality of the video surveillance at the drop box locations. I objected to this approach and told him that much more must be done on this front to ensure that people believe in the results of our elections.

After that conversation, I was pleasantly surprised that my producer was contacted by Martin’s office, and he came on my show to announce three reforms that he was instituting or calling for. First, he wants more precise and prominently placed warnings against depositing more than one ballot to be placed on and around the drop boxes. Second, he wants the drop box at the Lehigh County Government Center to be restricted to “normal” business hours. He wants voters to believe that someone might be watching.

Finally, he will dispatch county detectives in plainclothes to periodically monitor the drop boxes. This last reform has set off some Lehigh County Democratic leaders who say these detectives are intimidating and they have to deduct from their pay for any time spent observing the drop boxes.

I believe this local battle over drop boxes is occurring all over the country and that’s why I watched the debut of Dinesh D’Souza’s new film “2000 Mules,” at an area theater with my listeners. The premise of the film, as presented by D’Souza and True The Vote, is that by using cellphone geo-tracking and surveillance video, they were able to follow a network of “mules “in battleground states collecting ballots from get-out-the-vote outfits and then stuffing them a few at a time in multiple drop boxes, often in the middle of the night.

D’Souza concedes that in Michigan and Wisconsin the “mules” they have observed would not have deposited enough votes to overcome President Joe Biden’s margin of victory. However, he maintains that in Georgia and Arizona, their observations turn up more than enough votes to secure victory for former President Donald Trump in those states.

Incredibly, in Philadelphia alone, he maintains that 1,100 mules averaged 50 drop box visits each giving us 275,000 suspect votes that could have flipped Pennsylvania from Biden to Trump.

The film is well researched and tells the story in great detail. Even if you reject its premise about the numbers of suspect drop box votes, it underlines the need to remove mail-in balloting from our elections or continue to suffer a lack of confidence in election results.

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Chester County election officials want residents to know the mailings voters are receiving from Democrat-affiliated nonprofits are not official and they are not coming from the county.

“Two political advocacy groups, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI), will be conducting unsolicited direct mailings to Pennsylvania residents consisting of voter registration applications and vote-by-mail applications,” a county spokesperson said Monday. “These mailings will reportedly arrive on or about Monday, April 25, and are not endorsed by, or affiliated with, the Chester County Board of Elections or Chester County Voter Services.”

And those groups “bear all responsibility for the mailings, including any mailings that contain incorrect information,” the county said.

Tom Lopach is president and CEO of the VPC and CVI. He said the Washington, D.C.-based group sending mailings to voters statewide wants to register what Lopach calls “the new American majority.”

He said that “majority” is comprised of “people of color, young people and unmarried women.” Those groups tend to register to vote and turn out to vote in lower numbers than other groups. CVI and its sister group, VPC, also help turn out those voters.

“Our mission is to help increase voters in these three groups,” Lopach told Delaware Valley Journal.  He has been involved with the organization since March 2020 and said registering voters is “a proud thing to do” and “very patriotic.”

Lopach is also a longtime Democratic operative who has worked on multiple campaigns. The progressive news organization Pro Publica reported his organizations’ efforts pouring millions of unsolicited voter registrations into mailboxes during the 2020 election created confusion among voters and consternation among election officials.

“It’s not about the good that one organization does,” Jared Dearing, director of Kentucky’s State Board of Elections and a Democrat said at the time. “It’s about the net value for the whole system. If you register one person but create so much anxiety and consternation, how many voters get so turned off they don’t interact with the system at all?”

CPI sent 2.2 million vote-by-mail applications to registered voters in Pennsylvania. Lopach said they use forms that were approved by the state.

According to Lopach’s definition, the “new American majority” includes 5 million people in Pennsylvania or 52 percent of the state’s voting-eligible population. People 18 to 35 years old are about 29 percent of those eligible to vote; people of color, including Blacks and Hispanics, are 18 percent; and single women are 26 percent.

Asked whether his organization had received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, so-called “Zuck Bucks” that some believe helped sway the 2020 election for Democrats, Lopach said his organization does not discuss donors, nor is it required to disclose its donors, who are foundations and individuals.

“We are reminding Pennsylvania voters that voting in primary elections is easy. In Pennsylvania you can vote by mail, early in-person, or in-person on Election Day,” Lopach said. “We are providing more than 2.2 million registered Pennsylvania voters with official vote-by-mail applications, allowing them to sign them and drop them in the mail without ever leaving their homes. So make your plan to vote today and participate in our great democracy.”

“CVI and its sister organization, the Voter Participation Center (VPC), together run the nation’s largest mail-based and digital voter engagement programs,” the groups said in a press release. “In 2020, VPC and CVI helped 4.6 million voters sign up to vote by mail.”

While Lopach insists his groups are nonpartisan, others disagree with that assessment.

According to research by Hayden Ludwig of the think tank Capital Research Center, Lopach’s two organizations were founded by Page Gardner, who was a campaign staffer for former President Bill Clinton. Lopach said he knows Gardner but added he did not realize she had worked for Clinton. Lopach also has a background in Democratic politics. He had previously worked for Democrat Steve Bullock, former governor of Montana, and was executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“Gardner’s groups take advantage of IRS rules allowing nonprofits to engage in nonpartisan voter registration to target the ‘new American majority’—a group that gave more than 60 percent of its votes to Biden in 2020,” Ludwig said.

“The nonprofits are hardly ‘nonpartisan.’ CVI, the network’s 501(c)(4), spent $583,000 directly aiding Biden—but it’s their support for voting by mail that should concern conservatives. Unlike the right, the left is all in on funding groups that do nothing more than voter registration,” according to Ludwig. The mail-in ballots were to “flood key states with tens of millions of mail-in ballots.”

Charlotte Valyo, chair of the Chester County Democrats, said she has not had contact with either group. Chester County Republican Chairman Gordon Eck could not be reached for comment.

May 2 is the last day to register to vote in the May 17 primary. As of April 18, Chester County had 373,975 registered voters. Of those, 150,606 were Republicans and 155,604 were Democrats.

Anyone who receives an unsolicited VPC or CVI mailing who wants to be removed from the group’s mailing list must note a code near the bottom of the letter and email the code to the correct organization, county officials said.

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