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Make mail-in voting bipartisan again

In PA’s gubernatorial election, Republican Doug Mastriano had a good Election Day, winning some 60,000 more votes cast on Nov. 8 at polling places than Democrat Josh Shapiro. The problem for Mastriano, though, was that Shapiro cruised through Nov. 8, garnering more than 800,000 of the 1.2 million mail-in ballots cast, and he cruised to a 790,000-vote victory. Mastriano had promised to scuttle PA’s 2019 expansion of mail-in voting had he won because of unfounded concerns about voter fraud. But that won’t happen now, and after a disappointing election season, the GOP might be changing its tune. As PA National Committee person Andy Reilly told Politico: “When one party votes for 30 days and one party votes for one, you’re definitely going to lose.”

Seventy says: With new legislative sessions starting around the country next year, there’s an opportunity to reset the debate on election reform, C70 CEO Al Schmidt writes in Smerconish.com. “For leaders and elected officials of both major parties to embrace voting by mail will give us our best chance yet to improve our election laws in ways that maintain voter access while preserving election integrity. Partisans should have every interest in doing this. But it’d also be good for voters, not to mention our democracy.”

“Independent State Legislators” theory: A bullet dodged?

U.S. Supreme Court justices didn’t seem to find consensus during Wednesday’s oral arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case in which the lawyer for the plaintiffs—the state’s Legislature—asked the justices to apply a literal reading of the Constitution’s “independent legislature” clause that could bar state courts from reviewing election-related laws a legislature might pass. The justices may not rule until June, but observers expect that whatever emerges is still likely to leave many election-law checks and balances in place.

And as a practical matter: A literal interpretation of the theory could also split local and state races from federal ones, with separate rules for each. And that “invites both chaos and paralysis into the system in a way that election administration becomes unworkable to have different rules for different candidates in the conduct of that election on the same ballot,” C70 CEO Al Schmidt said at a webinar hosted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

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