Eighteen days from when the voting stops, no battleground state has its election procedures more up in the air than Pennsylvania.
Whether to permit an extension for the arrival of absentee ballots will be decided any day by the U.S. Supreme Court, protecting or disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters.
Whether to reject ballots for sloppy signatures will be decided any day by the state Supreme Court, determining the validity of thousands more votes.
Whether to allow processing of mailed ballots before Election Day will be decided any day at the state capital, either speeding or delaying results that could settle who wins the presidency.
And then there are the continued disputes over how expansively to permit ballot drop boxes, what to do with mistakenly duplicated vote-by-mail applications, how to recover from ballot printing mistakes, how much more to regulate poll workers — and whether discarded vote envelopes sent by Pennsylvanians in the armed forces overseas are a sign of sweeping election fraud. (The big hint here: There were nine of them, not the "thousands of ballots" President Trump falsely claimed Thursday night.)
All the indecision suggests that another round of fresh legal fights is likely to be unleashed after Nov. 3 if the national contest between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden remains too close to call — and Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes remain up for grabs. (State law says that's supposed to be settled with the certification of election results by Nov. 23.)
"I happen to think that Pennsylvania could be ground zero in the country for determining the outcome of the presidential election because of the delays from litigation," Philadelphia election lawyer Matt Haverstick t old Spotlight PA. "I have a feeling we are going to be the Florida of 2020."
The most dramatic possible scenario involves competing slates of electors vying for the eye of Congress — one group backing Trump that gets forwarded by the Republican-majority General Assembly, and a group for Biden endorsed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.
But that hypothetical would come true more than two months from now, and several more tangible disputes must be settled in the next two weeks.
In the meantime, a record 2.6 million Pennsylvanians have already asked for and received mail-in ballots, and 518,000 had been returned by the middle of the week. Four years ago, Trump carried the state by just 45,000 votes out of 6 million cast.
Assuming turnout is higher this year, as widely expected, the most important pending case looks to be the one before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans are asking the justices to reverse a ruling by the state's high court last month, ordering a three-day extension for the arrival of absentee ballots mailed by the time the polls close Nov. 3. The state's justices also ruled 4-3 that envelopes with a missing or unclear postmark must be accepted, so long as there's no indication they were sent in after polls closed.
More than 18,000 envelopes were tossed because they arrived after primary day in June, or about 1 percent of the total vote.
Republicans say Election Day arrival should be the rule again, not only because the state court imposed its will on a decision that should have been left to legislators but also because the justices changed the rules too close to the election. Both arguments have fared well in a series of election cases the Supreme Court has considered since the coronavirus pandemic upended normal election rhythms this spring.
The state high court said this week it would decide another big dispute before Election Day: Democratic Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's top election official, wants the court to prevent counties from rejecting ballots based on a subjective assessment of the signatures on the envelopes by election officials, who are not trained to see how handwriting can change over time. (About 1,800 primary ballots were rejected for this reason this summer.)
The Trump campaign wants to disqualify mail-in ballots with signatures that don't appear to match what's on file. A federal judge in Pittsburgh last week threw out a lawsuit to that effect, which also sought to lift the county residency rule for partisan election monitors and an effective ban on ballot drop boxes.
While Trump's team readies a federal appeal, his GOP allies in Harrisburg are pursuing his poll watcher and drop box preferences as their main objectives in negotiations over a last-minute election bill. But on Thursday the governor's office described his latest offer as having been spurned and said the talks are at an impasse.
Wolf's main goal is a change in state law to permit county election officials a head start of at least a few days to check the signatures, open the envelopes and stack the ballots for tabulating — painstaking work that right now can only begin the morning of Election Day. (Winners of some close legislative and congressional primaries were not clear for weeks afterward as a result of that late start.)
Such a switch would speed the vote count, assuring a vast majority of ballots are tabulated on election night and reducing the ability to credibly claim the results are being manipulated. At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump falsely asserted that the only way he could lose the state is if Democrats cheat. (Polling for now shows Biden with a single-digit lead.)
A spurt of worry about potential fraud quickly subsided Thursday but was supplanted by a wave of voter confusion.
The state reportedly rejected 372,000 requests for mail-back ballots that seemed fishy at first blush, but the cause of that enormous number turned out to be benign. More than 90 percent were duplicates — from people who failed to remember that, back when they asked to vote absentee in the primary, they checked a box to get a general election absentee ballot as well.
Even before the pandemic, the state had decided to drop strict excuse requirements on the books for years and to encourage more use of the mail — and the new system has proved baffling or worry-inducing to many, and overwhelming to local officials.
Officials in Pittsburgh, for example, were scrambling to get more than 29,000 replacement ballots to voters who had received vote-by-mail packets asking the to cast down-ballot votes for races in a different parts of the state
Only 4 percent of votes were cast by mail statewide just two years ago, but it was more than half in the primary.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.