Democrats aren’t above the rule of law either | Editorial

The usual election deniers have suddenly gone silent in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. Imagine that.
But in their absence, political disdain for the rule of law seems to have infected some Democrats too, right next door in Pennsylvania. The ugly fight over its close Senate results last week should serve as a cautionary tale.
Certainly, the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Bob Casey, who finally conceded to Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday, had every right to a recount. McCormick’s lead of less than half a percentage point automatically triggered one under state law, just to give additional confidence in the result.
But what did not add confidence was the bad behavior of some local Democrats, whose attempt to defy the state Supreme Court threatened to set a dangerous precedent and further erode our democratic norms.
At the request of lawyers for Casey, election officials in at least four counties – Philadelphia, Bucks, Centre and Montgomery – tried to flout the court’s ruling and count misdated mail ballots and unsigned provisional ballots.
That was wrong. One Bucks County official even made this knuckleheaded remark, which proceeded to go viral: “I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Diane Ellis-Marseglia said. “People violate laws anytime they want.”
She has since apologized. “It was genuinely not the best words… I feel terrible about it. I should have been more clear… I made a mistake,” she said. But the damage was done. It whipped up public anger and distrust in the entire recount.
After Republicans predictably sued, the high court last week slapped Democrats down on the misdated mail-ins, rebuking them for undermining “the rule of law.” So those disputed ballots were not counted.
The court did side with Democrats on counting the unsigned provisional ballots, but that’s still no excuse for their behavior that only undermined the vote count and their own case. To fully understand how they got here, though, it helps to know the backstory.
Whether ballots without proper signatures and dates should be counted has long been a topic of legal football in Pennsylvania, with plenty of hypocrisy on both sides. In fact, it was McCormick who argued in a previous lawsuit that incorrectly dated ballots should be counted, in the 2022 Republican primary he narrowly lost to Mehmet Oz.
We sympathize with the complaint that ballots are being tossed merely for clerical goofs, like missing a handwritten date: Mail ballots already have barcodes on their return envelopes that electronically record when they’re sent and received, as Spotlight PA reported.
If the Legislature wanted to clean up this mess, it could. But it’s never reformed the law, so it’s been left to what feels like endless litigation, said Daniel Mallinson, an associate professor of public policy and administration at Penn State Harrisburg. That’s beyond exasperating.
And as he notes, a legitimate, open question remains as to how the court will ultimately rule on these ballots, beyond this election. In 2022, it decided that if they don’t have proper signatures or dates, they can’t be counted. So, in that sense, the issue was settled, based on its interpretation of voting statutes.
But another suit this year made a different legal argument: That tossing them would violate the constitutional rights of voters. The high court initially threw out that case on a technicality, then refused to decide it because it was too close to the election. It simply stood on its initial ruling that if you didn’t date your ballot correctly, it should be cast out.
That means it may still take up this constitutional issue, which could be why the Bucks County official who made that boneheaded remark also hinted that she was seeking to get the court to take another look: “If I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention,” she said. “There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”
But that’s still no license to defy a court ruling, of course. Instead, why not follow it as required, discount the discredited ballots, and let any legal challenge come from Casey’s campaign? Forging ahead like this only undermined faith in what was actually a very careful recount.
No, this was not equivalent to what happened in 2020, when Trump concocted his Big Lie that the election was rigged. Triggering a recount and letting that play out – even with this ugly legal fight – is nowhere near as bad as creating a fantasy of election rigging without evidence.
And of course, Casey conceded.
Yet Democrats still shouldn’t have injected politics into the process and tried to defy the rule of law. “The idea that we shouldn’t follow the legal standards that we have just gives permission for everybody to say, ‘Well, I guess the laws are expendable,’” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics.
“That’s always a concern with norm violations,” Mallinson of Penn State Harrisburg agreed. “A lot of how our country functions is based on norms, and not necessarily laws. And when those norms start to erode, that makes it easy for them to continue to erode on both sides.”
No one is above the rule of law, Democrats included. The true test of a democracy, after all, is accepting the result even when you’re on the losing side.
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