In PA House, Voter ID & Vote-By-Mail reform bills move

Pennsylvania lawmakers will consider a package of election reforms including a voter ID requirement and changes to the commonwealth’s vote-by-mail law after a House committee passed the long-debated measures.

Most Democrats have staunchly opposed proposals requiring voters to prove their identities every time they vote but leaders have recently expressed a willingness to negotiate in exchange for support on other measures to modernize Pennsylvania’s election system.

On Tuesday, House Bill 771, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Mehaffie (R-Dauphin) passed with a bipartisan 14-12 vote in the House State Government Committee. Democratic Reps John Inglis of Allegheny County and Nancy Guenst of Montgomery County voted in support.

The committee voted along party lines, however, to approve an omnibus bill that would eliminate ambiguity in Act 77, the law that gave Pennsylvanians the option to vote by mail without an excuse for the first time in 2020.

The vote-by-mail provision has been the subject of numerous lawsuits, including one now before the U.S. Supreme Court, as candidates and parties have argued over how election officials should handle irregularities, such as errors on completed ballots, that are not explicitly addressed.

The bill would make clear that county election officials are required to notify voters if their mail-in ballots have been rejected for the lack of a signature and give the voter an opportunity to “cure” the error.

Among other changes, House Bill 1396 would also give election workers up to a week before Election Day to prepare to count mail-in ballots, a process that has been a bottleneck for election results in parts of the state, providing fodder for election deniers.

Rep. Brad Roae (R-Crawford), who is the ranking Republican member of the committee, said he has procedural objections to the bill and questions about how it might financially burden the counties responsible for implementing many of its requirements.

“This 98-page bill was called up about 20 hours and nine minutes after it was introduced, and that’s just not adequate time to read and understand and get feedback from our county election boards,” he said.

Republicans have pushed for a voter ID requirement as a response to unfounded claims of voter fraud for well more than a decade. The GOP-controlled General Assembly and Republican Gov. Tom Corbett enacted a voter ID law in 2012 but the Commonwealth Court found the measure unconstitutional, overturning it two years later.

House and Senate Republicans have unsuccessfully attempted to advance voter ID as a constitutional amendment but the issue hasn’t progressed since Democrats took control of the House in 2023.

This year, there are indications Democratic opposition is softening. In March, House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia) said she was open to discussions about voter ID as long as it doesn’t disenfranchise voters.

House Minority Leader Jesse Topper (R-Bedford) said he isn’t aware of any deal to encourage Democratic support for the voter ID bill, but he has asked for it to be offered as stand-alone legislation.

“Every year it gets caught up in a big omnibus thing. Over 70% of Pennsylvania support it. That’s not the case with some of these other measures. Let’s give that a chance to stand on its own. That was my request,” Topper said.

Under Pennsylvania’s existing law, voters must show identification when they vote at a polling place for the first time. Mehaffie said the legislation before the committee Tuesday would expand the list of acceptable documents that voters could show to prove their identities to include school or work IDs, utility bills and tax returns.

“We wanted to make sure that we saw that nobody was disenfranchised,” Mehaffie said, noting that polls nationally and in Pennsylvania have shown strong support for voter ID requirements. A Franklin & Marshall College poll last year found 73% of Pennsylvania voters support it.

Voters unable to provide an acceptable form of identification would also be able to have another person vouch for their identity by signing an affidavit, though Mehaffie noted falsely signing would carry criminal penalties.

Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of the democracy watchdog group Common Cause PA, said that while more options for voters to provide ID is better, the bill is flawed because it will only contribute to the complexity of administering elections.

“I don’t think the legislators who voted for this have really thought through the implementation challenges,” Hensley-Robin said.

He added that voter ID would deter voters regardless of the expanded list of acceptable identification. Hensley-Robin cited a study of the 2016 Wisconsin presidential election found 10 percent of nonvoters reported the state’s voter ID requirement was at least part of the reason they chose not to participate.

According to the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, scholarly research on the effects of voter ID laws has reached mixed and often contradictory conclusions.

A Goldman School review of the research concluded that certain groups such as seniors, students, people of color, people with disabilities, and transgender people are affected more by voter ID laws because they’re more likely to have difficulty obtaining acceptable identification. But some studies found voter ID requirements have a negligible effect on voter turnout.

Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia) opposed the legislation, saying that although voter fraud is “deeply insidious … because it cuts at the whole core of our democratic process,” the type of voter impersonation the Mehaffie’s bill addresses is exceedingly uncommon.

“We do not have enough instances that would even reliably outline this as one of the voter fraud issues that we should be taking up in this moment,” Kenyatta said, adding that issues that could be addressed by modernizing the state’s election administration system are more pressing.

The Pennsylvania Department of State inked a $10.6 million contract to replace the state’s aging Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors system that officials across the commonwealth use to keep track of voters, their ballots and other election-related services.

The omnibus bill voted out of committee Tuesday would provide for bond issues through the Pennsylvania Economic Development Financing Authority to pay for new software, computer hardware and other equipment to modernize election administration.

The legislation would codify procedures the Department of State has directed or allowed county election officials to use to make voting more accessible and secure, such as the use of ballot dropboxes, logic and accuracy testing for electronic voting machines and risk limiting audits.

It would also require counties to provide early voting, with one polling place open for 11 days before Election Day for every 100,000 registered voters. In the most recent election, some counties allowed voters to apply for, complete and return mail-in ballots at the election office in a form of makeshift early voting.

And the bill would increase the minimum pay for election workers to $175, which Rep. Heather Boyd (D-Delaware) noted would help alleviate a statewide shortage.

“This is going to make a huge difference in our ability to get people to take a full day off of work, maybe pay for child care all day long out of their own pocket,” Boyd said.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Tim Lambert for questions: [email protected].