The slippery slope to November 2024
Is this a slippery slope, or has the Fayette County Elections Board already tumbled into voter suppression and democracy denialism?
Whatever the case may be, it’s frightening – frightening in and of itself and frightening for what it could mean for the elections for governor and U.S. Senate this November and for president in 2024.
The Elections Board, dominated by Republican county Commissioners Scott Dunn and David Lohr, in refusing to count a sub-category of mail-in ballots from the May 17 primary election, is acting in defiance of both a federal circuit court and the state of Pennsylvania.
When Dunn recently told the 缅北禁地 that the board was “just tired of everything changing,” he might well have said, “We’re just tired of abiding by the rules. To heck with that. We’ll only count the ballots WE deem worthy of counting.”
To make matters worse, Dunn and Lohr have engaged a Chicago-based nonprofit law firm to handle the county’s legal case. The Thomas More Society, which specializes in religious liberty and election integrity cases, is apparently offering its services free of charge to the county.
Lohr told the paper’s Mike Jones that no county money will be used to fight a suit brought by the state to force Fayette, Berks, and Lancaster counties to comply with the election procedure mandate. The board is treating this matter as a purely private one, one that doesn’t involve the most important democratic, therefore public, function of them all – voting.
Memo to Dunn and Lohr: If you’re so certain that what you are doing is in the public interest, use taxpayer dollars to do it.
I suspect they won’t because they’re hedging their bets. If they lose in court, they will be able to say to their hard-pressed constituents, “Oh, well, at least you were spared the expense of our folly. You, dear taxpayer, didn’t lose a dime.”
Is it significant that all but three of Pennsylvania’s counties have somehow managed to count the ballots of mail-in voters who failed to place a date on an outside envelope – a chore deemed immaterial by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals? (Mailed ballots are time-stamped upon receipt in county election offices.)
The counties that have conformed to the court order run from deep blue Philadelphia to deep red Cumberland and all the hues in between.
It’s peculiar, Fayette County’s unwillingness to follow suit, to follow the path unerringly trod by 64 of the the state’s 67 counties.
In the case of Fayette County, a total of 52 mail-in ballots remain unreported to the state. All but a handful were posted by Democrats.
Unreported means the spring primary results are not yet finalized. How this threatens this fall’s election and the election for president in 2024 might be glimpsed in the contest for state representative in District 51.
Republican Matthew Dowling of Uniontown is the incumbent. Following a car accident in which he was cited for drunken driving, Dowling announced he was withdrawing his name from the general election ballot.
Now, he is contending he can’t do so, that is, not until the election is formally certified by the state. County Republicans, hoping to name a replacement for Dowling, have been stymied in doing so.
Also placed at a disadvantage while this is going on is Richard Ringer, the Democrat seeking the seat.
(Interviewed this week, Ringer told me he’s prepared to run against any Republican hopeful in the fall. At the same time, he was somewhat suspicious that Dowling might be angling to remain on the ballot, despite the incumbent’s earlier vow to withdraw. Not knowing for sure, Ringer nevertheless indicated he was alive to the possibility.)
All of this has created a sense of confusion around the race.
Now imagine if the office at stake was the presidency. Confusion would turn into chaos, especially if other counties decided, like Fayette, to write their own election rules and regulations, ignoring both the courts and the commonwealth in the process.
It’s not entirely clear, to me at least, what’s motivating Dunn and Lohr. Do they believe there’s been voter fraud as a result of the mail-in ballot ruling? That non-partisan election officials and the courts are out to steal elections from Republicans? Have they decided to take matters into their own hands because they must? Do they think they’re saving democracy?
In far too many instances, national and state Republicans have tumbled in a rabbit hole of unreality, spurred on by the MAGA infection. One very distinct possibility is that this Fayette County case is the fever manifesting itself at the level of local politics.
That’s bad – very bad.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached a dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.