PA Mail-In Voting Law Upheld By State Supreme Court

HARRISBURG, PA — Pennsylvania's mail-in voting law, long at the center of debunked claims of voter fraud in elections since the pandemic, was upheld by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Act 77, passed with strong bipartisan support before the pandemic to allow "no excuse" mail-in voting for any resident and to expand voting access, does not violate the state's Constiution, justices found.

The 5-2 decision reverses a lower Commonwealth Court's February ruling, in which Republican judges argued that the move required an amendment to the state constitution. That decision was immediately appealed to the high court by Gov. Tom Wolf's administration.

In their majority opinion Tuesday, Supreme Court justices wrote that the decision was strictly about existing law, and did not consider the political climate, or the fact that some of those who had sued over the constiutionality of Act 77 were the same individuals who voted to pass the bill into law back in 2019.

'In announcing its decision today, the Court looks past the celebrated bipartisan
nature of this law’s passage," justices wrote. "(It looks) past the fact that several of the challengers in the instant suit voted for its adoption; past whatever reliance interests may have developed as millions of Pennsylvanians became accustomed to voting by mail these past several years; and even past the startlingly offensive, antidemocratic overtones of the Chase Court’s rationale. We consider only whether any defensible construction of the text of our Constitution mandates in-person voting."

The legitimacy of mail-in voting, something trumpeted by former President Donald Trump in 2020 and taken up by GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in 2022, remains a rallying cry of the MAGA wing of the Republican party.

In dissenting from the majority opinion, Republican Justice Sallie Updyke Mundy said the Court had been "historically selective" in the precedents on which they based their decision.

"Its most glaring omission," Mundy wrote, "Is its failure to come to grips with the fact that the
Pennsylvania Constitution’s election-related provisions have been amended on numerous occasions in the 160 years since this Court first explained that by default it requires in-person voting, and in none of those instances have the people of this Commonwealth sought to eliminate, alter, or clarify the textual basis for that ruling as it appears in our organic law."