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Pennsylvania's Commonwealth court just ruled that ballots that are in Allegheny or Philadelphia must be counted, even if they are undated or misdated. This only applies to ballots submitted on time, purportedly. The takes that I've generally seen online are that this is evidence that they have plans for fraud. The court argued this, though, on the grounds that dates are unnecessary, as the counties have other means of telling when votes were submitted (I think they scan a barcode when received). But what's certainly a problem is that this decision was written to apply only to Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) and Philadelphia counties, the two counties that contribute the largest margin to the democrats. Given that they estimate that around 75% of mail-in ballots are for democrats in Pennsylvania, the most mail-in ballots are from suburban and urban voters, and that around 10000 ballots were not counted for that in 2022, this could have the effect of aiding the democrats by 5000 votes or so. Thankfully, this is only 0.07% of the vote, so not all that likely to be decisive.
The other interesting feature of this case is that the court ignored non-severability provisions, which said that if any provision of the act, or its application to any person or circumstance, was held invalid, the whole act is void. They did so merely by arguing for a presumption of severability in Pennsylvania laws, despite the explicit language to the contrary in this case. Voiding the act would have thrown out the entire mail-ballot system. Them striking down part of it, but not the whole thing, against the explicit text, seems the most sophistic part of the whole thing, to me.
This can still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. It's blue, though, so I'm not expecting changes. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like, barring fraud, the effect will be too large.
Edit: Make sure you read the comments of @Rov_Scam, where he argues that I'm not representing this accurately or completely—I don't want to be misleading.
I think this election will provide evidence for or against the 2020 election fraud narratives.
How? Because some states, but not others, are now taking action to prevent election fraud. And if Republicans outperform expectations in those states it would indicate that Democrats were benefiting from fraud. It's a natural experiment.
Virginia seems to be ground zero here. The Republican governor, Youngkin, has directed that the voter rolls be purged of people who are dead, non-citizens, or have moved out of state. Tens of thousands have been purged. To further prevent fraud, they will only allow paper ballots, and the machines that count the ballots will be tested and not connected to the internet. People will need to request an absentee ballot instead of mass mailing of ballots. And all dropboxes will be monitored 24/7.
All of this stuff is basic common sense and should be standard practice.
The fact that many states don't take these basic actions is sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, "there's no fraud, but also we're going to make it incredibly easy to do fraud". There's a good chance that this election will come down to how much cheating happens in corrupt cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Trump outperforms polls in Virginia. I also won't be surprised if he doesn't. Whatever happens, it will be a good opportunity for me to update my priors.
One of the things I find most irritating about these "Voter integrity" narratives is that they operate on the assumption that states have crappy systems while the people making the arguments have no idea what the systems actually are. I can't speak for what Virginia's laws were like before Youngkin, but the fact that only "tens of thousands" of voter's were purged after his directive suggests that things were actually running like they were supposed to. I live in Pennsylvania, a state that's often accused of shenanigans and was in fact so accused earlier in this very thread, and they purged nearly 300,000 voters from the rolls in 2020. There was nothing unusual about this because they "purge" a similar number every year because that's how many people die or move away every year. While I wouldn't expect some rando on the internet to know that, I would expect a gubernatorial candidate to know that before he says the state of the PA voter rolls is so messed up we need to do a total purge and require everyone to re-register. OF course, it's easy to keep track of people who move out of state if you're part of a multi-state system that keeps track of these things. Youngkin, however, decided to remove Virginia from the ERIC system, following the lead of other Republican-led states who were convinced by conspiracy theories about it being some evil Democrat vote rigging scheme. How these states plan on eliminating those who move elsewhere from the voter roles is currently anyone's guess, but election deniers would prefer to ignore that.
Again, Pennsylvania was doing this before 2020. Voting machines were never connected to the internet. I'm unaware of any jurisdiction that hasn't tested voting machines before an election, at least in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
I highly doubt this is the case. The most obvious concern about dropboxes is that someone could break into them and destroy the votes. This is not something I've heard the election deniers express any concern over. Instead, they express vague fears that the dropboxes will enable ballot harvesting that is somehow a vector for MASSIVE FRAUD. They might have an argument if the only place to cast these ballots were the dropboxes, but these are mail ballots. Every mailbox in the state is a potential ballot dropbox. If someone is going to ballot harvest they can just put them in a mailbox on the street, or mail them from their house for that matter. I doubt Youngkin is posting monitors at all public mailboxes, let alone monitoring households and businesses.
I mean, if states are doing this, then great! But let's be honest. Not all of them are. There are constant exposes about dead people on voter rolls.
Here's an article in which BBC "debunks" claims about dead people voting, then acknowledges that dead people did indeed receive ballots and maybe even vote, even if the maximalist fraud claims were untrue: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120
Given everything we know about state and local governments it's very unlikely that they do a good job maintaining clean voter rolls. Presumably the 80,000 people removed by Youngkin was opposed to the counterfactual of a Democratic governor. That's like 1% of the population of the state. It's big. But I'll admit that reporting on these issues is very low quality.
Personally, I think it's important to get this right, and to not dismiss concerns that people are voting illegally. You want people to buy into the system? Don't make them feel cheated. We need to have clean voter rolls. And we need to be able to easily prove that they are clean. To my knowledge, no states are doing that. The example of Michigan's effort to be transparent (in the linked BBC article) shows how badly managed these systems can be.
Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach.
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