The next presidential election may still be a year away, but voters in the nation’s biggest swing state just selected the public officials who will be in charge of running it. And much like in other parts of the country, Pennsylvania Democrats enjoyed a blessed night on Tuesday, keeping control of the populous suburbs where they’ve eased access to mail voting in recent years and beating some Republicans who had amplified former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud.
For one, Democrats swept the state’s judicial elections, including a decisive win in a hotly contested supreme court election, which gives them a stronger position when election lawsuits inevitably emerge next year.
They also celebrated a wave of wins in county commissions, which double as boards of election nearly everywhere in Pennsylvania and have a startling amount of discretion to shape ballot access in their counties, from deciding whether to install any ballot drop boxes allow voters to fix mistakes on mail ballots. Democrats defended all the local gains they made four years ago in what was already a historically excellent election cycle, and also appear to have flipped two more populous counties away from Republican control.
Some Pennsylvania counties have drop boxes for voters to conveniently deposit absentee ballots and proactively notify voters who make mistakes that risk invalidating their ballot, such as leaving the outer envelope undated or unsigned—a policy called ballot curing. Other counties choose not to have drop boxes or ballot curing processes since state law leaves that matter entirely up to local officials. While these differences do not neatly break along party lines, populous counties run by Democrats have been more likely to set up drop boxes and allow ballot curing.
“You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project.
The resulting patchwork frustrates voting rights advocates who want the state to enforce stronger standards, but for now it compounded the importance of Tuesday’s elections for ballot access in Pennsylvania. “We’re heartened by the fact that, because of these elections, voters will have greater confidence that curing provisions and ballot drop boxes will stay in place in many places where they currently are,” Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told Bolts on Wednesday.
Tuesday’s results would also make it tougher for the Trump campaign to try to invalidate results, if the former president, who is the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination, attempts to overturn an election as he did three years ago.