Election Day was still a few weeks away, and Renee Smithkors, the long-serving director of elections in Bradford Country, Pa., had already had to call sheriff’s deputies 10 times to deal with people who were showing up at her office riled up by rumors about early voting or mail-in ballots.
“There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there,” Ms. Smithkors said, as her staff processed new voter registrations from behind a bulletproof wall inside the county elections office beside the courthouse in Towanda. “I can’t wait for December, when this will all be over.”
Voting has changed dramatically in Pennsylvania over the last several years, with some changes landing in the closing stretch of this year’s election cycle, stirring confusion, anxiety and tension just a couple of weeks before a presidential election that may be decided by the state’s 19 electoral votes.
In Bradford, a mostly rural county along the state’s northern border, local officials voted last week to reverse a policy that had allowed voters who made a mistake on their mail-in ballot to request a new one. Instead, their only option will be to go to the polls on Election Day and cast a provisional ballot.
It is one of a host of voting changes that have been percolating in various counties across the state and that underscore the particularly powerful role that local officials can play in Pennsylvania when it comes to implementing state election laws.
Some of the policies, including those that deal with drop boxes, may seem modest. But in Pennsylvania, where the presidential winner was decided by 44,292 votes in 2016 and 80,555 votes in 2020, the jockeying for access to the ballot box is of national consequence.
Indeed, the debate that played out last week between Bradford County’s two Republican commissioners and its one Democratic commissioner — who also serve as the county’s election board — went far beyond whether a new mail-in ballot could be requested.
Commissioners Doug McLinko and Daryl Miller, the two Republicans, had both pushed to stop mail-in voters from receiving a second ballot in the event of an error, and the proposal passed 2-1, with the Democrat Zachary Gates voting against.
Mr. McLinko and Mr. Miller also used the meeting to denounce Pennsylvania’s secretary of state and the legislators who passed the mail-in voting law in 2019. They discussed overhauling voting in ways that went far beyond the legal authority of the county.
And echoing former President Donald J. Trump’s pre-emptive attacks on the integrity of 2024 election, Mr. McLinko and Mr. Miller have raised unsubstantiated concerns about statewide voting procedures. The winners of Pennsylvania’s 2020 elections were affirmed by mandatory audits, and the outcomes were upheld after a host of court challenges.
With about 60,000 people, Bradford is one of the state’s smaller counties, and in 2020 more than two-thirds of its ballots were cast for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Miller floated the idea of refusing to participate in the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, a system for managing voter rolls across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. Mr. McLinko said he hoped to go further, eliminating mail-in voting and replacing it with paper-only ballots.
This isn’t the first time that Mr. McLinko has inserted himself into the statewide conversation. He is known to election law experts as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the state law that established no-excuse mail-in voting. He endorsed Mr. Trump for president in 2016 and ran on a Trump-inspired border-wall platform in a failed 2018 primary bid for Congress.
In 2020, Mr. McLinko voted not to certify Bradford County’s election results, reportedly claiming long after the election was over that “Donald Trump did not lose Pennsylvania,” even though Mr. Trump did in fact lose the state and the election to President Biden.
That wasn’t enough for Mr. McLinko, who showed up at the National Mall on Jan. 6, 2021, to hear Mr. Trump dispute the outcome. “I never went near the Capitol,” Mr. McLinko said in an interview after the election board meeting in Towanda last week. “Anybody that did any destruction should be punished.”
Mr. McLinko said it was possible that he might vote against certifying his county’s election results again, regardless of who wins. “I’m undecided on that,” he said. “It comes down to whether I believe it was a fair election and whether my votes from my rural county got negated because of chicanery.”
Compared with most other states, Pennsylvania gives county commissioners more discretion when it comes to the details of the voting process — how to deal with different methods of writing the date on mail-in ballot envelopes, whether to let mail-in voters know about errors and whether those errors can be fixed. But courts have consistently rejected the notion that county officials can pick which ballots and elections to certify. In Pennsylvania, attempts in 2022 by four counties to exclude some mail-in ballots from their certified totals were denied by state courts.
Refusals and delays on certification at the county level are on the rise. In Waynesboro, Va., two Republican members of the elections board have pledged not to certify the results, claiming that voting machines violate the state’s Constitution. Last week, a Georgia judge ruled against supporters of Mr. Trump who argued that county officials have the right not to certify results. “If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Judge Robert C.I. McBurney wrote.
The pushback from the courts hasn’t stopped some county officials from trying to cast doubt on the election, in some cases weeks before it even began. One member of the Board of County Canvassers in Kalamazoo County, Mich., reportedly said he would refuse to certify the 2024 election should it unfold like 2020. (He backed down after the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit.)
Experts say that while it’s likely that there will be more county-level refusals to certify election results in 2024, the courts remain a backstop. “In some respects, this is election denial theater, to try to create controversy and the impression of something improper happening,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive think tank at the New York University School of Law. “The good news is that there are many legal processes and guardrails in place to make sure that certification happens.”
But the more officials raise unfounded suspicions about the voting process, the more certification, once a formality, could become politicized. In Mr. McLinko’s view, voting against certification is a way to protest a flawed process, and anyone who wants to vote should be willing to visit the polls in person. “Voting, you know, it should be made simple, not easy,” he said.
As of last week, the Bradford County rule change will effect 32 voters who mailed in ballots that Ms. Smithkors’s office has found to have errors. One of them, Michael Kennedy, an 84-year-old Navy veteran who lives in the borough of Athens, took the complication in stride. He helped his wife, who has Alzheimer’s, complete her mail-in ballot.
Hers was accepted, but he forgot to sign the outer envelope of his own. He learned of his error when he got a phone call from a voter turnout organization that had obtained the public list of rejected ballots. He said that he was looking forward to traveling to the polls on Election Day to cast a provisional ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris and didn’t feel put out by the county’s last-minute rule change: “It was my damn mistake. It wasn’t theirs.”
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