Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA) speaks about military spending at a BAE Systems military vehicle production plant in York County on Aug. 19. U.S. Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA-10) and Lloyd Smucker (R-PA-11), State Senator Dawn Keefer (R-31), State Representative Seth Grove (R-196), and President Commissioner of York County Julie Wheeler also spoke.
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Jordan Wilkie / WITF News
Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA) speaks about military spending at a BAE Systems military vehicle production plant in York County on Aug. 19. U.S. Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA-10) and Lloyd Smucker (R-PA-11), State Senator Dawn Keefer (R-31), State Representative Seth Grove (R-196), and President Commissioner of York County Julie Wheeler also spoke.
Three Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s recent statement that he wants to eliminate voting machines and mail-in ballots is theoretically appealing but impractical, as elections are managed by the 50 states, not the president.
Asked about Trump’s comments on Tuesday, U.S. Senator Dave McCormick didn’t criticize the president. But he made the point that mobilizing more Republicans to vote by mail last year helped him and Trump both win in Pennsylvania.
“My number one view is I would never want to unilaterally disarm,” he said during a press event at BAE Systems’ armored vehicle assembly plant in York County. “I would only want to go down that path if there was a real path where they were eliminated across the board. I’m not sure if that’s a viable path or not.”
Two fellow Republicans who were in McCormick’s company, Congressmen Lloyd Smucker and Scott Perry, said election rules are generally left up to the states.
“ I don’t know exactly what the president has in mind here, but I would have some hesitation with taking control of all of the election process at the federal level,” said Smucker, who represents Lancaster and York counties.
Perry, who represents Dauphin County and large swaths of Cumberland and York, pointed to the U.S. Constitution, which says states set the time, place and manner of elections.
All three Republicans said they would prefer that all voting take place on Election Day, without mail-in ballots or voting machines. Congress can change those rules for the entire country, but none of the three Republicans said they were considering bills to do so.
Trump raised the voting issue in the wake of his August 15 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. While negotiating an end to the Russia-Ukraine war was the goal of the meeting, Trump said he and Putin discussed the results of the 2020 presidential election. Putin, he said, told him he believed Trump’s loss to Joe Biden that year was the result of mail-in voting fraud.
Trump brought that and other unsubstantiated claims to court in 64 cases before the election was certified. Judges dismissed each claim of fraud.
Russia is one of the least democratic countries in the world, according to reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a business intelligence group affiliated with The Economist newspaper, and Freedom House, an advocacy organization for protecting human rights.
Experts and counties weigh in
Barbara Smith Warner, who leads the Washington, DC-based Vote At Home Institute, said military members and their families vote by mail. So do people with disabilities and people with multiple jobs or other obligations keeping them from taking time off on Election Day.
Rolling back vote-by-mail would be difficult in Pennsylvania, she said, and it would be all but impossible in the eight states that vote entirely by mail. She does not believe Congress will eliminate mail-in voting, she said.
“The truth is, regardless of what you hear otherwise, voting by mail is not a Democratic thing or a Republican thing, it’s a voting thing,” Smith Warner said.
Julie Wheeler, president commissioner in York County, said mail-in balloting creates a financial burden for her county, but inconsistencies in state law are the real burden.
“ For us at the county level, what we want is a consistent and uniform election code… so that counties conduct elections in a fair and equitable manner across all of the counties in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Wheeler said.
As for voting machines, the county’s election system is not designed to have people hand-count ballots, according to a statement from spokesperson Brett Marcy.
“The current in-person voting system for conducting elections in York County is dependent on electronic voting machines,” he said.
Mark Lindeman, policy director for the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, said getting rid of voting machines would be unworkable.
“You would need armies of people to count all the ballots, badly,” Lindeman said.
People are less accurate than machines, manual counting would take up a huge amount of space, and the process for accumulating results across precincts, states and the country would be very difficult and likely introduce problems, he said.
Whether voting in person or by mail, U.S. elections are probably cleaner now than they have ever been, Lindeman said.
Sarah Niebler, a political science professor at Dickinson College, said voters care about getting election results quickly. Counting by hand would be a huge barrier to quickly determining winners and losers.
Pennsylvania already has two types of post-election audits that require a sample of ballots to be counted by hand to ensure the voting machines count correctly.
A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.
