As Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) appeals a court ruling against no-excuse absentee voting, a state representative hopes to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution to decisively end the practice.
A bill authored by State Rep. Russ Diamond (R-Lebanon), who is also running for lieutenant governor, would explicitly limit mail-in voting to those who are sick, injured or traveling. This status quo existed before Wolf signed Act 77 in October 2019.
Diamond and nearly all other Republican legislators voted for the new law for reasons unrelated to its expansion of absentee voting. For one thing, the act abolished the straight-party voting option that used to appear on every Pennsylvania election ballot. The law furthermore provided $90 million for the purchase of new voting devices to replace older machines that Wolf forced counties to decommission.
Despite favoring those sections of Act 77, Diamond Wednesday wrote a blog post calling that bill “the only vote I ever regret making in my seven years in Harrisburg,” mentioning the component allowing unexcused mail-in voting as the reason. He stated he no longer believes that provision is constitutional, citing the case made by Bradford County Commissioner Doug McLinko (R) whose arguments convinced the Republican-controlled Commonwealth Court to strike down that part of the law.
Pennsylvanians are now waiting for the Democrat-run Pennsylvania Supreme Court to tackle the issue, generally expecting the majority of justices to favor permitting no-excuse absentee voting. Whichever way the court rules, Diamond hopes fellow lawmakers will support his bill to change the state Constitution restoring pre-2020 absentee-voting rules. To become law, the legislation must pass the General Assembly in two consecutive sessions and get approved by a majority of voters in an election.
“If the Supreme Court upholds the Supreme Court’s ruling, then my amendment would incorporate that into the Constitution with specific language that explicitly says you can only vote in person or by the standard absentee system,” Diamond told The Pennsylvania Daily Star. “If the Supreme Court overturns the Commonwealth Court decision, then my bill serves as a rally point for those Pennsylvanians who want to dump no-excuse mail-in voting with a constitutional amendment that can get around a governor who would be inclined to veto it.”
Diamond said that expanded absentee voting could’ve at least been more defensible if Wolf, then-Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar (D), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court hadn’t disregarded security measures contained in Act 77, ostensibly reacting to COVID-19. Diamond suggested that the real reason Democratic officials permitted the use of ballot drop boxes (which weren’t authorized by law) and overlooked other rules for submitting mail-in ballots was to defeat President Donald Trump rather than to adjust to the pandemic.
The representative said dangers arising from the failure to enforce security safeguards are compounded by notorious problems with the Keystone State’s voter-record system, known as the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE). Those issues were the subject of a December 2019 report by then-Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (D). They included nearly 3,000 undeleted records of potentially deceased voters and over 24,000 cases of the same driver’s license number appearing on multiple voter records.
In Diamond’s estimation, such concerns would ultimately persuade a majority of Pennsylvania voters to adopt his amendment were it to appear as a ballot question.
“I have no doubt that voters would overwhelmingly vote in favor of that,” he said, “given all the issues we’ve seen with no-excuse mail-in voting.”
Former State Sen. Bruce Marks (R-Philadelphia), who worked as an election lawyer for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns, said he agreed with Diamond that the new absentee voting rules are problematic and that voters should get a chance to rescind them. He nonetheless said they may be unlikely to do so since many residents have gotten into the habit of voting by mail over the course of two election cycles.
“I’m in favor of letting the populace decide important constitutional issues like that, so I think it’s great,” Marks said. “The only thing is that, despite the fact that I don’t agree with mail-in voting, I think that you’re going to find because people have done it and found it was convenient for them that [Diamond’s measure] may not succeed.”
Marks himself had to survive a voter-fraud scheme in order to win his Senate seat in a 1993 special election. The machine vote count favored Marks over Democratic opponent William Stinson by a narrow margin, but the absentee ballots later added to the count initially seemed to decide the race in Stinson’s favor.
Though Stinson was sworn in that November, Marks sued and subsequent investigations determined that almost 1,000 of the Democrat’s votes were tainted by fraud.
The federal court removed Stinson from office and Marks was subsequently sworn in to serve the remainder of the Senate term.
The former state senator said his example demonstrates that mail-in voting is especially vulnerable to fraud, particularly because no one is around to witness attempts at chicanery or coercion. He said another flaw in absentee voting is that it doesn’t allow ordinary citizens to interact directly with candidates, political parties or their surrogates at the polling place. Thirdly, Marks dislikes that many people use absentee ballots merely to vote early, which can lead them to make decisions based on less information than they may have had if they waited to visit the ballot box.
“We know there are often important events that break close to elections,” he said.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Russ Diamond” by PA State Rep. Russ Diamond. Background Photo “Mailing Ballot” by Phil Venditti. CC BY 2.0.
