Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Pa. offers fresh evidence rejected mail ballots can be decisive

Pennsylvania voting

Unlike this Philadelphia voter, most Pennsylvanians mailed their primary ballots in June. About 20,000 were rejected.

Bastiaan Slabbers/Getty Images

In what could be a sobering preview of the November election, about 20,000 absentee ballots returned for the Pennsylvania primary were not counted because they arrived too late or the envelopes weren't signed.

While a tiny share of the overall vote in June, the number has enormous potential significance for the presidential election. That's because, in 2016, Donald Trump carried the state and its 20 electoral votes by just twice that amount, 44,000 votes.

The rejection number, reported this week by election officials in Harrisburg, underscores how a close presidential outcome — and the arguments both candidates might make in challenging the results in tossup states — will be shaped by lawsuit decisions and legislative maneuvers in the next seven weeks over the once-arcane rules governing mailed votes.


The numbers of votes cast remotely will balloon into the millions this fall, just in the battleground states alone, as people continue to avoid public places like voting stations because of the coronavirus pandemic. The switch comes against a backdrop of relentless and unfounded allegations from Trump that widespread mail voting will produce massive election fraud.

In addition, the ability of the Postal Service to properly handle the large number of mailed ballots has been called into question because of changes instituted by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor.

About 90 percent of the uncounted ballots in Pennsylvania were the result of missing the deadline for their arrival at the election offices. The state is one of 33, along with the District of Columbia, that require mailed ballots to arrive by Election Day.

That rule is unlikely to be changed by the Republican-majority General Assembly, which has been haggling with Democratic Gov. Tom Wolfe over what looks to become a very modest collection of last-minute election law changes — perhaps including new permission for local clerks to begin before Election Day the preparing of returned ballots for tabulating as soon as the polls close.

Much of the remaining rejected June ballots were tossed because signatures on the envelopes were missing or looked unlike the signature in the voter's file. On Monday state officials told election administrators in the 67 counties they may no longer reject a ballot solely because an election official believes the handwriting is off. That prompted the League of Women Voters and the Urban League to drop a federal lawsuit challenging the signature rules.

The rejection rate in the Pennsylvania primary was relatively small, less than 1 percent of the 2.7 million ballots cast and just 1.3 percent of the 1.5 million votes submitted by mail.

Of the 33.4 million mail ballots cast in the 2016 general election, about 1 percent were tossed, according to the federal Election Assistance Commission.

Read More

RFK Jr. Vowed To Find the Environmental Causes of Autism. Then He Shut Down Research Trying To Do Just That.

Erin McCanlies spent almost two decades at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health studying how parents’ exposure to chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. This spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated her entire division.

Nate Smallwood for ProPublica

RFK Jr. Vowed To Find the Environmental Causes of Autism. Then He Shut Down Research Trying To Do Just That.

Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump’s Imperial Presidency: Putting Local Democracy at Risk

U.S. President Donald Trump visits the U.S. Park Police Anacostia Operations Facility on August 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker

Trump’s Imperial Presidency: Putting Local Democracy at Risk

Trump says his deployment of federal law enforcement is about restoring order in Washington, D.C. But the real message isn’t about crime—it’s about power. By federalizing the District’s police, activating the National Guard, and bulldozing homeless encampments with just a day’s notice, Trump is flexing a new kind of presidential muscle: the authority to override local governments at will—a move that raises serious constitutional concerns.

And now, he promises that D.C. won’t be the last. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia—cities he derides as “crime-ridden”—could be next. Noticeably absent from his list are red-state cities with higher homicide rates, like New Orleans. The pattern is clear: Trump’s law-and-order agenda is less about public safety and more about partisan punishment.

Keep ReadingShow less