Editorial: Pennsylvania ballot dating dilemma is a political Groundhog Day

The dating of ballots in Pennsylvania is a Groundhog Day kind of issue.

No, we don’t mean that it pops its head up in February and then crawls back into its burrow to finish a long nap. No, we don’t mean that it is a kind of nonsensical, made-up affair that gets stirred up into something much bigger than necessary. (Well, maybe, but that’s not the point right now.)

Nope, what we are talking about is not a similarity with the holiday, but with the 1993 movie where a weatherman is trapped in a time loop that keeps replaying the same thing over and over again.

That is the issue of dated — or rather, undated — ballots in Pennsylvania.

The passing of Act 77 in 2019 changed one aspect of how Pennsylvanians go to the polls — namely that they don’t have to do so. Today, the Keystone State lets people vote by mail without being out of state or physically unable to get to a polling place. Sign up ahead of time and you will be provided a mail-in ballot. You can pick your candidates, stick the ballot in an envelope and drop it off at the mailbox. Easy peasy.

Except it’s neither easy nor peasy because politics doesn’t let anything be that simple.

Since the 2020 primary, there have been repeated challenges to the process. For one thing, that envelope isn’t just any envelope. It’s two envelopes. One is a security envelope. The ballot goes in that, gets sealed and that goes in the mailing envelope.

But after five primary elections, four general elections, and as we approach the second presidential election with this process, there are still people haggling over the dating of the ballots. Whether ballots without dates should or shouldn’t be counted has been in front of county boards of elections, courts of common pleas, the Commonwealth Court, the state Superior Court and all the way up to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Not just once. Multiple times.

On Friday, it happened again. The state Supreme Court tossed a lower court ruling that it is unconstitutional to dismiss ballots with incorrect dates on the outer envelopes. Republicans heralded the ruling as a win. Democrats are seeing an opportunity to go back to the drawing board as the opinion is procedural. The issue hinges on the jurisdiction of Commonwealth Court.

It is obscene that Pennsylvania voters keep waking up wondering where this sits.

Last week, a Tribune-Review reader — an engaged consumer of news who regularly writes on a variety of topics — asked a question. After several years of this being rehashed, he was no longer sure exactly what he should write on the envelope. Is it the day he fills it out? The day he mails it? The date of the election itself? (It’s the date the ballot is completed.)

The constant court battles have taken a regular voter and made him unsure, not of his position or his candidate but of the simple procedure of casting a ballot.

When will this end? Will it end at all? More likely, Pennsylvanians will continue to think that this has reached a conclusion — whether they agree with it or not — and prepare to move forward. Then everything will reset and here we are, back at the start with a new lawsuit preparing to work its way through a web of filings, refilings, appeals and opinions.

Don’t wait for the state to sort it out. Just date your ballot or show up at the polls in person. Your voice is more important than their politics.