This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s collaboration with Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting. Sign up for Votebeat's free newsletters here.
Pennsylvania lawmakers beginning their new legislative session this month are preparing to debate what changes, if any, should be made to the way the state’s elections are run.
Once again, Republicans are planning to champion expanded voter ID requirements, while Democrats want to answer county calls for more time to process mail ballots and implement early voting.
Their discussions will follow a highly scrutinized presidential election that ran smoothly compared with the 2020 contest, when counties were slow to produce unofficial results and faced a barrage of fraud claims.
Aside from a new law providing state funding for county election offices, no major changes have been made to Pennsylvania’s elections in the past four years, despite plenty of discussion about it.
One top lawmaker hopes Donald Trump’s election — and Democrats’ ready cooperation in accepting and certifying it — will open up space for more fruitful legislative talks during the two-year session.
"Hopefully there's an ability to move on some of these election reforms without some of the vitriol and hyperbole that unfortunately overtook the GOP after being defeated in the 2020 presidential election,” state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) said in an interview.
A few areas for possible bipartisan agreement
Polling from the Pew Research Center released in December showed that confidence in elections had increased roughly 30% since 2020, driven by increased trust among Republicans.
Despite that increase, some right-wing election integrity activists at the national level are continuing to pursue the priorities they’ve been pushing since the 2020 election. That goes for Pennsylvania as well, where Republican legislators have said they will reintroduce prior legislation on issues like banning mail-ballot drop boxes and satellite voting offices and repealing mail-in voting, or at least suspending it for three years.
But there are areas of agreement and for potential compromise between the parties.
State Sen. Pat Stefano (R., Bedford) is asking colleagues to join him to end the annual mail voter list, where voters can sign up to receive a mail ballot application automatically every year. Election officials say that program confuses voters who do not remember enrolling for it.
He also wants to make it so that only the Department of State and county election offices can send out ballot applications, which many third parties now send out on their own. Mail ballot applications sent to voters by third parties are often also confused for actual mail ballots.
At least one Democrat appears to support these ideas. State Rep. Joe Webster (D., Montgomery) plans to introduce similar bills aimed at reducing confusion on both issues.
A bipartisan group of state senators wants to combat the use of artificial intelligence to generate content that fraudulently misrepresents candidates. The potential for AI to disrupt elections and spread misinformation is something Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt has also warned about.
As for House Democrats’ priorities, Bradford pointed to a collection of bills the caucus put forward last session. They would create early voting, address the lack of uniformity in voting rules among counties, and give counties time before election day to prepare mail ballots for counting, a process known as precanvassing.
The precanvassing bill has already been reintroduced for this session by state Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre).
“Obviously there would need to be some give and take by both sides to get [those issues] over the finish line,” Bradford said, “but we are hopeful again as we move past the election craziness of 2020 that our Republican friends can engage meaningfully on election reforms.”
Debate over mail ballot preprocessing continues
Precanvassing has been the most sought-after reform for county election offices since the introduction of no-excuse mail voting in 2020. The increase in mail ballot volume has strained the resources of county governments, and they have advocated for a system used in many other vote-by-mail states, where election administrators can start precanvassing before election day to spread out the work. Currently, Pennsylvania counties cannot start processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on election day.
Lawmakers made a last-ditch effort to pass such a bill in the run-up to the 2024 election, but it stalled in the state Senate, where Republican leadership has maintained that any election reform must be paired with stricter voter ID requirements.
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) says that tightening voter ID requirements is still “fundamental” to his caucus’ priorities.
“Current law is that a first-time voter has to demonstrate that they are who they say they are, and we see no reason that shouldn't be enshrined as something that is consistently done when an individual exercises their right to vote,” he said in a separate interview.
Public polling shows a majority of Pennsylvania voters support requiring ID to vote. Bradford said that House Democrats are ready to discuss it, and noted that, in the last session, he and other members of his caucus supported expanding voter ID rules to all voters whenever they vote.
Pittman said that he thought counties managed the 2024 election well, and that any changes to election laws should be done cautiously with that in mind. He said that he thinks the county's efficiency in processing mail ballots during the presidential election, for example, shows that precanvassing is not a necessity.
“When there's a perception that the rules have changed … it leads to suspicion, and we cannot have a lack of confidence in our electoral process, perceived or real,” he said. “And anything that we do in statute going forward has to be done in a way that makes sure that it does not somehow erode the confidence in our process.”
Election reform has remained elusive in Pennsylvania, but the long break before the next federal election and growing trust in elections could provide a new window of opportunity.
“Municipal years are the most critical when it comes to making changes,” said Jeff Greenburg, a senior adviser on election administration for the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Committee of Seventy. “The time to do it is now, so counties are not doing it in a presidential year.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
