Pa. Supreme Court again rules that Philly and other counties cannot count undated mail ballots

[BumRushDaShow]

4. This is the issue exactly

The "law" (Act-77) was hastily devised as a means for the GOP to get rid of "straight-party ticket" voting that Democrats tended to widely utilize because it was easy (in the past, "pull one lever" or fill in one oval and the whole party slate was voted for).

The "exchange" was to suddenly allow "mail voting" by creating a new category - a "no excuse absentee ballot". That was the "sweetener" added to the bill so that-then Gov. Tom Wolf would sign off on it and he did.

I remember attending "telephone Town Halls" with my state Senator and asking about whether we would ever get mail ballots and at the time (before 2019), he was sure that it wasn't even being considered.

In any case, we did finally get mail ballots, but what they did with this was to add some hurdles like dates/signatures on outer envelopes (ignoring postmarks) and secrecy envelopes, etc., as well as require that no mail ballot be "canvased" (ballots removed from envelopes and prepped for scanning) until the polls opened on election day.