… Republican voters like voting by mail
The voters who are older like the opportunity to vote by mail. Generally, older voters are Republican, so mail-in voting would appear to to become Republicans would support.
That, however, is not the case. Republicans in Pennsylvania who overwhelmingly supported mail-in ballots now want the courts to declare them unconstitutional.
Seriously.
This is called counter-intuitive, but such is the USA in 2021.
How did this happen?
What occurred was that the Republicans believe that Joe Biden stole Pennsylvania, but when they had to prove that in court, they could not come up with a single instance to prove their case,
Universal, no-excuse mail-in voting has survived a court challenge in Pennsylvania and will live on after an eventful first year on the books. But a look back to its creation through its critical role in the 2020 election offers a window into how policy and politics can shift on a dime.
“Everybody thought this was a good idea — a great idea, in fact — until Trump spoke out against it,” said Joe Mistick, a law professor at Duquesne and local political commentator.
Act 77, the Pennsylvania law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting, came together in 2019 as a compromise between the Democratic and Republican parties. Republicans achieved their goal of abolishing straight-ticket voting, which Democrats agreed to in order to obtain the vote-by-mail expansion.
Mistick said the law made Pennsylvania “a symbol, an example of bipartisanship, of how the two parties can come together for the good of the franchise and set aside their political differences.”
A lot has changed since then.
Charlie Wolfson, “Trump politicized mail-in voting in 2020, but it came to PA with strong Republican support,” Public Source, December 10, 2020
Despite their being no evidence, they want to pursue this nefarious conspiracy theory.
Lawsuit by those who ironically voted for the bill
So, now Republicans see something happening in their state and in America. If they continue to allow people to vote, their chances of hanging onto power beyond this decade will disappear.
That is the reason for this counter-intuitive move,
Fourteen Pennsylvania House Republicans filed a new lawsuit this week alleging that the state’s vote-by-mail law, which was passed with near-unanimous Republican support in 2019, is unconstitutional.
The 34-page suit filed in Commonwealth Court on Tuesday night asks for the state court to declare the law unconstitutional, and prevent the state from issuing mail-in ballots to Pennsylvanians who do not have a work, health, or religious excuse for not voting in-person in upcoming elections.
The law, Act 77, allows all Pennsylvanians to request and to return, a mail-in ballot with no excuse. It was heavily used in the 2020 presidential election amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eleven of the 14 House GOP lawmakers who filed the suit voted for the law. Two were not in the General Assembly at the time. And one, state Rep. David Zimmerman, R-Lancaster, voted against it.
Nine of the lawsuit’s ’s plaintiffs also signed a December 2020 letter asking Congress to toss Pennsylvania’s electoral college results, and most were involved in other efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election.
Stephen Caruso, “14 house Republicans file lawsuit to strike down Pa’s vote by mail law. 11 voted for it,” Pennsylvania Capitol Star, September 2, 2021
These people know that passing a constitutional amendment is a long process that must be approved by voters in a referendum, but they still believe that it was the way to delegitimize the election in 2020.
What makes this ridiculous is that Republican voters as a whole approve of the mail-in voting process. Nevertheless, this feeds the paranoia of certain Republicans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen, even when the right-wing Supreme Court disagreed with them.
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