Editorial: Why won't GOP lawmakers fix the voting law they don't like?

You can’t get a Democrat and a Republican to agree on much of anything in Pennsylvania — especially when it comes to elections.

But, on Friday, a Republican state judge sided with Democrats, including Gov. Tom Wolf, about a pile of contested ballots in three counties.

Are they the heavily debated mail-in ballots some GOP members wanted audited from the 2020 presidential election? No. Commonwealth Court President Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer sided with Wolf over the ballots from the May primary. The big issue there was who would be the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in a close battle that put Dr. Mehmet Oz over David McCormick, who conceded in June.

It’s not that all judges vote on party lines the way lawmakers tend to. It’s just that, the more political the issue, the party colors tend to bleed through the ruling a little. (See recent state or federal Supreme Court rulings.)

But it was refreshing to see Cohn Jubelirer deliver an opinion that practically sighed with exasperation over the question that has been plaguing courts and election boards for two years: dates.

The ruling directed Berks, Fayette and Lancaster county officials to count the ballots that had been set aside from the primary because they did not have a date in the designated area on the outer envelope. She dismissed the lack of date as unimportant to the process.

In addition, the judge lobbed responsibility squarely back to the Legislature, which voted for expanding no-excuse mail-in ballots in 2019’s Act 77. The language of that law, Cohn Jubelirer wrote, doesn’t give direction on rejecting undated ballots.

This is an issue of precision, not politics.

Cohn Jubelirer’s criticism of the language follows the state Supreme Court’s decision upholding Act 77 as constitutional after being challenged by 14 GOP lawmakers — 11 of whom voted for the legislation.

It is just the latest decision regarding no-excuse mail-in ballots that finds it to be permissible.

Cohn Jubelirer is correct. The language is the problem. If the GOP lawmakers don’t like the law they passed with bipartisan support, they should fix it. They have had plenty of time to do so as they have spent two years protesting mail-in ballots, and they hold majorities in the House and Senate.

Legislators need to stop asking the courts to do what they won’t or haven’t done. They need to write changes that do what they failed to do in 2019 — and what they have failed to correct on their own.