The Homa Files

An interesting development last night.

Justice Alito — who is the SCOTUS point man for the Pennsylvania region — issued the following order:

All county boards of election are hereby ordered, pending further order of the Court, to comply with the following guidance provided by the Secretary of the Commonwealth on October 28 and November 1, namely,

(1) that all ballots received by mail after 8:00 p.m. on November 3 be segregated and kept “in a secure, safe and sealed container separate from other voted ballots,” and

(2) that all such ballots, if counted, be counted separately.

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So what?

IMHO, the GOP case is pretty strong.  The Constitution says that state legislatures set the rules for elections, not other government officials or state courts.

The PA legislature’s law says that ballots must be received by 8 p.m. on election day.

It can be debated whether that’s a good rule … but, it’s the law!

The Dem election officials changed the rules to accept mail-in ballots for the whole week.  Their decision was upheld by the PA Supreme Court.

So, the the question is a Constitutional one, not vague charges of vote fraud.

Big deal or little deal?

That’s unclear.

(1) In yesterday’s press conference, the state’s chief election official was unable (or unwilling?) to report how many ballots fell into the late-arriving category.

So, could be a lot … or, could be few.  That’s a big unknown.

(2) Though PA election officials previously issued rules comparable to Justice Alito’s, there are reports that some (many?) PA counties didn’t follow the rules — either out of ignorance or defiance.

This could be a very big deal !

First, it’s conceivable (but unlikely, IMHO) that here are enough late arriving votes to swing the election results.

Second, what if the SCOTUS rules that the late-arriving votes are, in fact, unconstitutional … and PA “finds” that counties haven’t been segregating the votes and that there’s no way to separate them after-the-fact.

What does the SCOTUS do to remediate that situation?

I see only 2 options: (1) let all the votes count and tell PA to not to do it again, or (2) disallow all mail in votes because the pool of votes was irreparably contaminated.

This could get very interesting…

This entry was posted on November 7, 2020 at 7:00 am and is filed under 2020 Presidential Campaign. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.