WASHINGTON, DC – Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, responded to reports by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar that there are significantly fewer late-arriving ballots than in the primaries, and too few overall to affect the outcome of the presidential race. Just weeks ago, Secretary Boockvar, alongside other liberal politicians and activists, predicted mass disenfranchisement unless she was permitted to disregard state law and count tardy votes. A majority of states require ballots to arrive by election day to be counted, but progressive groups challenged these laws—and often won collusive consent decrees—in a bid to count late ballots.
“For months, Americans were treated to conspiracy theories of USPS ‘sabotage’ to slow down mail-in ballots and disenfranchise huge numbers of mail-in voters. This fearmongering was used to justify an unprecedented legal onslaught by deep-pocketed progressive groups in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, to force these states to count late—and legally invalid—ballots.
Now that the election is behind us, we are seeing these arguments for what they are: baseless and unfounded. Voters across the nation had ample avenues to cast their ballots in a timely fashion, with weeks of absentee voting, early in-person and safe Election Day voting opportunities. There was simply no reason to depart from democratic norms to try to rewrite election laws in courts mid-election, and in fashions designed to skew elections for partisan gain. Voters should have been told the truth from the beginning. If anything, this only caused unnecessary confusion among voters and risked chaos—and even lengthier delays—in the vote-counting process.”