RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pennsylvania supreme court has spoken — spoken again, spoken with exasperation, spoken for the third time during the election cycle — and has finally lowered the boom on Senator Bob Casey Jr.’s futile attempts to fight his loss to Dave McCormick in the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate election.

As most here are already well aware, Casey lost narrowly to McCormick on November 5, but rather than concede the race, he instead hired Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias to try to squeeze a victory out of electorally impossible math. Elias’s proposed workaround? Cheat! Yes, just violate the law and dare someone to stop them. Let’s hope that, after today, they have finally been stopped.

McCormick currently leads Casey by around 17,000 votes, with nearly all valid ballots counted. All that remains to be counted are invalid ballots — those rejected for facial invalidity in one way or another, most often for missing signatures or missing date marks. Elias’s strategy has been to enjoin the Democratic commissioners of the Boards of Elections in Centre, Montgomery, Bucks, and Philadelphia Counties (all heavily Democratic strongholds except for Bucks, which was fought to a draw this year) to continue counting undated late-arriving mail ballots.

The problem is that Pennsylvania law and case law specifically stipulate that such ballots are invalid. The matter had already been litigated before the state supreme court twice before Election Day — and both times the court insisted that no, the law meant exactly what it said: Undated absentee or mail ballots are presumptively invalid.

So the boards of elections in those four Democratic counties, in their infinite wisdom — and not, say, with Marc Elias in their ears — apparently decided that this rule was unconstitutional, particularly when it involved a close race with a Democratic Senate seat on the line. They were appallingly open about the fact that they were breaking the law, as well — as Bucks County election commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia proudly proclaimed when announcing that the board would be counting invalid ballots despite the Pennsylvania supreme court’s prior rulings: “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country. People violate laws anytime they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”

Read that quote twice. It was as proud a statement of naked lawlessness as you will ever hear from an official charged with election integrity — and an obscenely ironic inversion of every charge ever leveled against Republicans being a threat to free and fair elections. (Congratulations on confirming every paranoid’s worst fears about Democratic insolence of office, Diane!)  The New York Times, once again playing to type so predictably as to render parody pointless, covered the controversy with the euphemistically deceptive headline “In Pennsylvania, the Election Litigation Continues, with a Twist.” Yes indeed, such a piquant twist — a twist of illegality! (As one person joked on Twitter with reference to the classic U.K. sitcom Peep Show, “The secret ingredient is crime.“)

In any event, when the Pennsylvania supreme court handed down its brief order today, the majority opinion was written with cold fury.  The court granted the McCormick campaign’s application for extraordinary jurisdiction and wrote tersely to open (citations omitted):

The Court hereby ASSUMES its King’s Bench authority over the Instant Application, only to DIRECT that all Respondents, including the Boards of Elections in Bucks County, Montgomery County, and Philadelphia County SHALL COMPLY with the prior rulings of the Court in which we have clarified that mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code SHALL NOT BE COUNTED for purposes of the election held on November 5, 2024.

The language of the Court (“shall comply” in both bold and all-caps, neither of which are necessarily required) says it all in its barely concealed anger and disbelief at the Democratic commissioners and their repeated refusal to obey the law. (The concurrences are equally bewildered and outright mention how appalled they are to have to be ruling on something they already made crystal clear.)

With any luck, this finally tolls the end of the McCormick/Casey race, but nothing is official until Casey concedes. Let us just marvel at how quickly the Democrats have switched sides with those who denied Trump’s loss in states such as Georgia and Arizona back in 2020. “I personally think it’s unconstitutional and wrong” is the sort of excuse that a lot of MAGA folks invoked back then, and when they actively tried to interfere with the election’s integrity, they (rightly) got it with both barrels from the law.

How terrifying it is, and how eye-opening as well, that when the shoe is on the other foot, the Democrats not only declare proudly they will not respect the law, but do so with complete confidence that they will never pay a price for flaunting their lawlessness. Regardless: It’s time for Bob Casey to go.