Commonwealth Court decision on Pennsylvania's mail-in voting law must be challenged

A statewide court said last Friday that Pennsylvania’s two-year-old mail-in voting law is unconstitutional, agreeing with challenges by Republicans.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration is right to swiftly appeal to the state Supreme Court, immediately putting the party-line decision by a panel of three Republican and two Democratic judges on hold and stopping it from overturning the law.

Still, the Commonwealth Court decision unfortunately throws Pennsylvania’s voting laws into doubt as voters prepare to elect a new governor and a new U.S. senator in 2022.

The decision by Common Court must be challenged.

The court’s decision comes after a politically motivated turnabout by state Republicans who switched their views on mail-in voting after former President Donald Trump began baselessly attacking it as rife with fraud in his 2020 reelection campaign.

The Republican-controlled Legislature authorized no-excuse mail-in voting for all voters in 2019. The law expands upon a provision in the state constitution that requires the state to provide the option for voters in specific circumstances.

Those circumstances include being out of town on business, illness, physical disability, Election Day duties or religious observance.

Every Republican lawmaker, except one, voted for the legislation in a deal with Wolf, who had sought the mail-in voting provision. In exchange, Wolf agreed to get rid of the straight-ticket voting ballot option that Republicans had sought as a way to protect their suburban candidates from an anti-Trump wave in 2020’s election.

The constitution does not explicitly say that the Legislature cannot extend absentee voting to others.

Wolf’s office said its appeal means the lower court ruling has no immediate effect, and criticized Republicans as trying to kill the law “in the service of the ‘big lie’” of Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.

“We need leaders to support removing more barriers to voting, not trying to silence the people,” Wolf’s office said.

Mail-in-voting worked.

Just over 2.5 million people voted under the law’s expansion of mail-in voting in 2020′s presidential election, most of them Democrats, out of 6.9 million total votes cast.

An Associated Press investigation into potential cases of voter fraud in Pennsylvania and the five other battleground states where Trump disputed his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020 found a minuscule number of cases.

Election officials in 11 of the state’s 67 counties identified a total of 26 possible cases of voter fraud, representing 0.03% of Biden’s margin of victory. He defeated Trump in Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes.

Despite the repeated lies pushed by Trump and his supporters there has been no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania or any other state. There is no basis for removing the mail-in-voting in Pennsylvania.