Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have heard the consternation about mail-in ballots in PA resulting from the dreadful Act 77. Broadly speaking, there are two positions:
- NOT using mail ballots is the problem. Mail-in ballots have become the law in the Commonwealth. We’re getting our butts kicked by them. We are losing elections long before “Election Day” if we don’t get much higher utilization of them. We may not like them but the only way to get rid of them is to win. And clearly the only way to win is to improve our use of mail-in ballots.
- USING mail-in ballots is the problem. We do not have meaningful chain of custody of our ballots. We may be able to know that a vote was cast in our name when our ballot was received, but we cannot know that OUR vote was cast when our mail-in ballot was received. Moreover, our ballots are not counted in a decentralized fashion (at the precinct). Poll watchers assert that, even in central tabulating facilities, they cannot provide meaningful oversight of what is happening with the count. Finally, we have seen several elections that were, by all appearances, going to go one way, surprise everyone and go another. Whether Democrat or Republican, when elections don’t pass the smell test, fraud is being alleged, and it can be neither proven nor disproven. We’re told to “trust but verify”. If we can’t verify, it is impossible to trust. We should not be compelled to use a system that cannot be established to be secure.
