Kathy Boockvar was recently interviewed by the Washington Post about the failure of the Pennsylvania Senate Republicans to pass an important bill for election administration efficiency – relating to what is called “pre-canvassing” of mail ballots. PA is one of only 7 states in the U.S. that do not allow county election officials to begin processing absentee ballots before Election Day, including opening the envelopes and scanning the ballots into the voting systems, with observers present. 43 other states allow their election officials to start this process weeks or days before Election Day, which means come Election night, they only have about one day’s worth of ballots to process.
The consequences are clear for PA: millions of mail ballots will all have to be processed on and after Election Day, which means that Pennsylvanians and the country will once again have to wait longer for PA election results. Additionally, many are concerned that this may exacerbate the deterioration of trust in the election process and continue to make election workers targets for harassment.
Election officials at the county and state level, as well as voters and many other stakeholders have been calling for change for the last 4 years, and the PA House approved a bill earlier this year that would resolve this delay. Nonetheless, the PA Senate refused to pass this commonsense election reform that would benefit everyone and would cost nothing.
“It’s reprehensible that they didn’t get it done,” said Boockvar. “This is not rocket science. The reality is that not passing this bill will mean that ballots will take longer to count, which means it will be longer until we have the results of the election.”