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Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2023 - 2024
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | May 31, 2023 09:59 AM |
|---|---|
| From: | Senator Jarrett Coleman and Sen. Cris Dush |
| To: | All Senate members |
| Subject: | Ensuring voters have the right to change their minds: Restoring the Primacy of In-Person Voting |
| Soon, we will introduce legislation that would restore the primacy of in-person votes. There is a very practical reason for restoring primacy to in-person voting: what if someone changes their mind? We live in an age of the 24-hour news cycle and a world’s worth of information at our fingertips. Restoring primacy to an in-person ballot ensures that voters can change their mind if new information comes to light about their preferred candidates, or something happens to change who they believe deserves their vote. It is my belief that the in-person vote should always have primacy over the vote cast by mail, and my forthcoming legislation will do just that. By way of a little history, prior to Act 77, absentee ballots were distributed to the election districts alongside election supplies. They were held at the election districts and then counted at the close of polls. Voters who had voted an absentee ballot were afforded an opportunity to appear at the polls, void their absentee ballot, and vote in person. Effectively, this gave primacy to in-person voting by ensuring that the vote cast in-person was always the vote counted. Since the passage of Act 77, any voter who requests a mail-in ballot is forced to cast a provisional ballot. If that voter’s mail-in ballot is timely received by the county, the provisional ballot is not counted and the mail-in ballot is counted. Effectively, this gives primacy to the mail-in ballot by creating a situation where if both a mail-in ballot and an in-person ballot are cast in a voter’s name, the mail-in ballot is the ballot that is counted. For many of our constituents, casting an in-person ballot also offers a sense of security for a second reason too. It is extremely difficult for a person to fraudulently cast an in-person vote for an elector and deprive that elector of their right to vote. We owe it to Pennsylvania voters to ensure they have the freedom to change their mind up to election day and recognize the security that comes along with casting an in-person ballot. Please join Senator Dush and I in cosponsoring this important legislation. |
Introduced as SB1038