From Pennsylvania Common Cause: (https://www.commoncause.org/pennsylvania/):
Pennsylvanians across the state braved a global pandemic and widespread civil unrest to exercise their right to vote last Tuesday.
Many of them voted in polling places that were not socially distanced or where poll workers didn’t have proper personal protective equipment (PPE), and others waited in long lines within earshot of chanting protestors.
But while the primary did not run smoothly for many people, especially Black and Latinx voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the availability of a vote-by-mail option for every registered voter mitigated some of the problems we would have otherwise seen on Election Day.
Go to https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/make-vote-by-mail-more-accessible-for-november to tell your representatives: Pennsylvania must make the necessary reforms to ensure vote-by-mail is more accessible to voters this November!
Over 1.8 million Pennsylvanians voted-by-mail in our primary election, with many of them able to do so because of the bipartisan work completed in ACT 77 — which allowed voters to vote-by-mail without needing an excuse.
Even with the new mail-in ballot option, voters have always had the right to cast a ballot in person, although with potential recurrences of COVID-19 on the horizon, we expect far more Pennsylvania voters to take advantage of the mail-in option in November.
We have to act now to make sure that the same problems we saw last week don’t come up again in the fall.
Maximizing the number of Pennsylvanians who vote-by-mail will go a long way toward minimizing long lines and crowding at the polls on November 3rd — both necessary changes to keep voters safe.
To ensure that all voters have access to the ballot, our legislature must act now: mail-in ballots must be sent to all registered voters, and county boards of elections must have the staff and resources they need to ensure a safe and secure election >>
The state and counties did the best they could with the resources they had, but those weren’t enough — and they won’t be enough to keep voters safe this fall.
As Interim Executive Director Suzanne Almeida told PennLive, “If county elections offices don’t receive additional resources to address problems like these, we are very concerned about what will happen in November.” [1]
Additional funding would be immensely impactful to the chronically under-funded county boards of elections. They could buy more PPE for poll workers and voters, pay for printing and pre-paid postage costs for mail-in ballots, and implement enhanced ballot tracking services.
At such an unprecedented time in our nation’s history, our ability to participate in our democracy has never been more important.
We are running out of time to keep voters safe this fall. Join us in urging your representatives to send vote-by-mail ballots to all registered voters and increase funding to county boards of elections.
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