By LDF Vice President Tom Spencer

The strategy of what former VP Biden called his “enormous vote fraud” team in Pennsylvania has been to drastically loosen the security measures of absentee ballots.  Biden’s lawyers have litigated to: substantially extend the deadline for receipt of mail ballots, provide for “ballot harvesting”, dump the traditional requirements for signature match, provide for widespread and unsupervised ballot boxes, and obliterate the requirement that mail ballots be “postmarked” by November 3.  They have been mostly successful.  This achievement has not been through lobbying legislatively mandated election laws, but by decisions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. And like the situation in Bush v. Gore, 20 years ago, Pennsylvania is once again a contest between a liberal Supreme Court and a Republican Legislature, draped against fundamental principles of election integrity and the proper role of the states in their “Manner” of conducting fair and honest elections in which citizens can have confidence. 

The result of the lawyering by the Democrats and the left has been that it is now the  “law” in Pennsylvania that ballots which have not even been verified as being signed by the voter must be  counted without any meaningful indication that they were cast on or before the federal Election Day, November 3.

Republicans were unsuccessful in attracting enough votes in the evenly divided Supreme Court of the United States to stay the decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.  Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal wing of the Court.   The Court did not, however, rule on the substance of the Republicans’ challenges to the stripping of ballot security measures and extending the federal Election Date.  And in a case regarding Wisconsin earlier this year, the Supreme Court affirmed the importance of Election Day and not allowing voters to vote after Election Day.

But Friday, the Pennsylvania Republicans filed a Petition before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court requesting a stay of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rulings while a Petition for Certiorari is filed in the Supreme Court of the United States.  The Republicans argue that the issues are enormously important because a number of states have mirrored Pennsylvania and pushed out the legal date of receipt of mail ballots without real safeguards to ensure that no one votes after Election Day. The Republicans want the Pennsylvania court to segregate “late arriving” ballots, pending a decision by the United States Supreme Court. 

The Pennsylvania case has great significance as to who wins the election. At issue is whether states have the Constitutional right to so significantly lower the bar of ballot security and integrity. In addition, most states have a requirement that mail ballots must be received on or before the federal Election Day. Can one state effectively extend the federal Election Day or can candidates reasonably demand that the federal Election Day be uniform throughout the country? 

This case may be one of the first cases determined by the vote of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.