Speaking of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania officials have notified the U.S. Supreme Court that the Secretary of the Commonwealth issued guidance to county boards of election directing them “to securely segregate all mail-in and civilian absentee ballots received between 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and 5:00 p.m. on Friday, November 6, 2020, from all other voted ballots.”

The cutoff under Pennsylvania law for receiving mail in ballots to count is 8 p.m. A state Supreme Court ruling extended that to 5 p.m. on Nov. 6 but that extension is under court challenge. Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to declare that order unconstitutional.

  NBC

It worked in Wisconsin.

UPDATE:

Pennsylvania state officials are in the extraordinary position of actively taking defensive steps to preempt a situation in which the Supreme Court helps Trump suppress untold numbers of lawfully cast ballots — as Trump has openly declared he expects it to do.

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Pennsylvania is Ground Zero for this experiment. It is the tipping-point state and the place where Trump’s corrupt machinations could have their most palpable impact.

In an interview, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) shed some light on what this could look like in coming days.

“We have a sitting president who’s actively trying to undermine this election,” Shapiro told me. “He’s doing that because he knows that if all legal eligible votes are counted, he’s more likely than not going to come out on the losing side here in Pennsylvania.”

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a ruling allowing for Pennsylvania ballots arriving up to three days afterward to be accepted.

But Shapiro bluntly warned that Trump and Republicans will still likely try to use those late-arriving ballots “as a hook to challenge all mail-in ballots.”

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The counting of mail ballots will go on for days after the election. If Trump is ahead in the initial count of in-person Election Day votes — and far more Republicans intend to vote on the day itself — he could declare victory while seeking to invalidate uncounted mail ballots.

It doesn’t matter that much what Trump declares. What matters is whether the court is willing to halt the count.

  WaPo

Bush v. Gore, anyone?

Pennsylvania officials tried to preempt this by announcing that they will segregate all late-arriving ballots. The idea is to prevent Republicans from challenging those ballots and then using that to challenge all mail ballots, by claiming they’ve all been commingled and can’t be separated from one another, requiring a halt to the count until the legal dispute over the late ballots is resolved.

“A careful decision was made to try to stave off the anticipated legal challenges by Donald Trump and his enablers,” Shapiro told me, though he declined to comment on how their strategy might unfold.

There are many reasons to doubt such a scheme could succeed. But the Supreme Court hasn’t given us grounds for assuming there’s nothing to worry about.

In allowing the acceptance of late ballots, the high court let stand a Pennsylvania state Supreme Court ruling permitting that acceptance, rebuffing arguments that it infringed on the authority of the GOP-controlled state legislature to set election rules.

But the U.S. Supreme Court only declined to nix those late-arriving ballots for now, just before the election. And three conservatives — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — indicated that after the election, they may revisit the question.

Worse, the justices said there’s a “strong likelihood” that the state Supreme Court’s ruling is unconstitutional, because if state courts can “override” the legislature on setting election rules, that renders its authority over those rules “meaningless.”

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If Amy Coney Barrett and Brett M. Kavanaugh subscribe to this — and Kavanaugh already has, in a related decision in Wisconsin — five justices could invalidate untold numbers of late-arriving ballots after the election.

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There’s also the more narrow matter of whether the high court will invalidate just those late ballots, which alone could conceivably matter in a very close election.

“We just don’t know” what’s going on with those ballots right now, Shapiro said. But he professed confidence that ultimately, Democrats will prevent both the invalidation of those ballots — and any broader scheme Trump might try. “I’m confident we’ll win again,” Shapiro said.

I'm glad he is, but I'm not.