Weiss is a consultant to a commercial printer and a member of the local Democratic Committee in suburban Philadelphia's Montgomery County.
The coronavirus has changed just about everything in our day-to-day lives. How we vote is no exception. Mail-in voting will be used by more voters than ever. But where I live — in the most populous suburban county of one of the country's biggest presidential battlegrounds — the procedures are being kept secret for getting absentee ballots sent to voters, then securing and counting them when they're returned.
No-excuse mail-in voting is new to Pennsylvania this year and is being implemented on a county-by-county basis. But there appears to be little oversight or direction from the state elections office in Harrisburg regarding how each county is to implement the new law, provide for cyber-security and physical security, or validate electors and count ballots.
Between February and last week, elected state and county officials, and the Montgomery Board of Elections, were not responsive when asked about plans and procedures for handling the expected surge in mail-in ballots. Prior to the primary in June, the county cited the emergency conditions of the pandemic in saying it was not able to answer the public's right-to-know requests. After that, the county started postponing its promised answers, 30 days at a time. Even some basic information guaranteed by the state's election laws was not provided for the primary, despite five requests by certified mail to the Elections Board chairman, Ken Lawrence.
For a stark contrast, look to Seattle. While people answering the phone at the Montgomery County Voter Services office were referring all questions about mail-in ballots to an online open records request form, the similar office in King County offers a video tour of its counting facility — and, when telephoned, provided helpful information about equipment and staffing levels. Colorado, which like Washington has conducted all elections by mail for years, provides a trove of information on government websites.
The lack of such transparency in Pennsylvania is alarming for many reasons. The following questions and more go unanswered:
- What are the standards to approve an application for a mail-in ballot?
- Who is handling the ballots? Are private mail shops being used to send ballots to voters? If so, what steps have been taken to prevent political interference in the process?
- Are there any tracking procedures being used in conjunction with services available from the Postal Service?
- How is material handling being done? Is the storage space secure? What happens if stored ballots get damaged before they're counted — if the roof leaks, for instance?
- How are voter signatures being verified when ballots are returned? How are county employees trained to do this? Is software being used? What happens if there is a problem?
- What happens when ballots are damaged by tabulating equipment? (We have all watched sheets of paper being "eaten" by a document feeder on a copier.)
- What information will be given to poll watchers to help them ensure all ballots are counted, but only counted once?
Based on my experience working with commercial printers and their full-service mail shops, an error rate between 1 percent and 2 percent would not be unreasonable for the first-time processing of a job similar to the size and complexity of the job Montgomery County is facing in November. (Just 4 percent of the 447,000 votes cast in the county in the last presidential contest were absentee; this time the share could easily top 50 percent.)
Smaller counties will likely have a lower error rate, because fewer ballots requires fewer formal procedures for an acceptable result. But in a competitive election, the error rate could still be far greater than the margin of victory.
Montgomery made many mistakes during the primary. Many ballots were not sent, as state law requires, within 48 hours of an application's receipt. The secretary of state's office found that 9.6 percent of those applications were rejected, the highest share among the state's 67 counties, while another 5 percent of county voters confronted other problems — including receiving ballots for the wrong party or wrong precinct.
Finally, there were no obvious quality checks in place for the processing of mailed ballots and virtually no training provided to the election workers responsible for processing the votes.
Had county officials been more transparent from the start, many of these problems could have been headed off.
Certainly, Pennsylvanians do not wish to be debating after the election the rules for counting ballots in what looks to be another super-close presidential race. (President Trump carried our 20 electoral votes by just seven-tenths of 1 point last time.)
County election boards and elected representatives should be providing detailed information now for public review about how ballots will be protected and processed. Anything short of complete transparency calls into question the mail-in vote — and whether voters using this process risk being disenfranchised by inadequate quality assurance procedures, shoddy vendors or poor worker training.
Last week, Montgomery County's chief operating officer, Lee Soltysiak, sought to provide assurances during an hour-long call. The election office has been reorganized into two divisions, one to handle voting on Nov. 3 and one to process mailed ballots. New equipment is being installed and space has been rented for ballot counting and storage. Standard operating procedures are being developed along with worker training for processing ballots. Enhanced security measures are to be implemented. A new vendor has been selected to send out the ballots.
And a public information campaign will be launched soon — although voters haven't been told this raft of heartening news yet.
Citizens who want fair elections cannot simply expect them to happen. They need to press their local governments for complete election transparency — and assurances about when to expect results will be reported.
Only making election transparency an important issue today will ensure fair and uncontested election results in seven weeks, regardless of the complications from Covid-19.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.