PHILADELPHIA — Pennsylvania’s mail voting law is constitutional, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, upholding the 2019 measure that allows any voter to use mail ballots and removing a cloud of uncertainty heading into the midterm elections.
The law, used for the first time in 2020, dramatically expanded mail voting from a method that had been allowed only in a very small number of cases — about 5% of votes in any given election — to one used by millions over the last two years.
It was the product of bipartisan negotiations between Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republicans who control the state legislature. But its implementation came during both the first year of the pandemic and an intensely heated presidential election. As massive numbers of voters cast ballots by mail, state and county elections officials tried to build out the system, in some cases triggering Republican outrage and lawsuits over their decisions.
