Pennsylvania Activists Prioritize End of No-Excuse Absentee Voting
May 16, 2022 | Pennsylvania
A coalition of more than 70 grassroots organizations across Pennsylvania issued a declaration at the state’s Capitol Building in Harrisburg last week urging lawmakers to repeal no-excuse absentee voting.
The activists would end a provision of Act 77 of 2019, a law passed by the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly, which permits Keystone State residents to vote via absentee or mail-in ballot without stating an excuse. Formerly, valid reasons for voting away from the polls mainly included out-of-town travel and illness.
“Whereas electoral integrity is essential to the functioning of a constitutional republic,” the declaration began, “and … Whereas, the move to mail-in and drop-box voting in Pennsylvania has seriously undermined the integrity of the electoral process … We the People of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania do hereby demand that the Pennsylvania state legislature immediately return the Commonwealth to in-person voting on election day, with the exceptions as noted in the PA election code prior to ACT 77, with photo identification, proof of U.S. citizenship and state residency and hard copy paper ballots.”
Announcements about how the coalition plans to encourage lawmakers to reverse the policy will likely be made in the coming days, Sam Faddis, president of Susquehanna County-based Unite PA, told The Pennsylvania Daily Star.
Faddis said the impetus to demand that legislators reverse the expansion of absentee voting stems from concerns he and many other coalition members have regarding the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania in which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by about 80,000 votes. Faddis described the result as “at best, highly questionable.”
“We went from a pretty tried-and-true system based on the foundation of in-person voting very rapidly to a system of mail-in voting with very few checks and just, from my viewpoint, a kind of endless series of points of vulnerability,” he said…. (Excerpt from the Pennsylvania Daily Star)
