Any effort to update Pennsylvania’s elections law is going to run through state Sen. Cris Dush’s State Government Committee. No matter what changes House Democrats pass, they are going to need some buy-in from the Jefferson County Republican.
Dush’s committee has not reviewed any major election issues this session, including the omnibus election reform bill passed on a party line vote in the House in May.
Instead, Dush and his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Sen. Steven Santarsiero, presented a bill Tuesday to codify current Department of State practice allowing public observation of voting machine testing and requiring reports when machines malfunction. The committee passed the bill unanimously.
“Right now, we’re working on things that can actually get bipartisan support,” Dush said.
Passing voter ID is Dush’s biggest priority, he has previously said. But support for a voter ID bill proposed in the House fell apart the day before its scheduled vote last month, highlighting the fact that any voter ID change needs both Democratic and Republican buy-in.
House Democrats and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration have stated they remain open to a bill that doesn’t disenfranchise voters. For his part, Dush wants to pass a bill that will stand up in court. Previous voter ID laws have been struck down in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
“If I can find something that will work, that will be upheld by the Supreme Court, we’re going statute,” Dush said, meaning his panel would propose an update to current law. “If not, we’ll do an amendment.”
Republicans in the House and Senate have introduced constitutional amendments to require voter ID, though House Democratic leaders have said they would not pass such a bill.
The voter ID bill that was to be considered last month in the House appeared to be a bargaining chip Democrats hoped to use to leverage GOP support for other election reforms, including changes requested by the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. Those include pre-canvassing, or the ability to begin processing (but not counting) mail-in ballots before Election Day, clarifying rules and timelines for mail-in voting, and codifying some election security practices already in place.
“One of the top priorities for our county election offices is pre-canvasing of mail-in and absentee ballots,” Santarsiero said. “We have discussed this important issue, and while we have not yet reached an agreement, I look forward to working with Sen. Dush to finally get this vital change for our county election officials.”
Upcoming election bills
Next up for the Senate State Government Committee is a technical bill to bar voting systems from including voter selections in a barcode as part of a printed ballot card. That would require 20 counties to upgrade their voting equipment, according to data from the election technology nonprofit Verified Voting, which has worked with Dush’s office on the legislation.
One impetus comes from a 2023 error in Northampton County, which uses a “ballot marking device” at its polls, a voting machine that prints a completed ballot after a voter makes selections on a computer screen. There, the machines were misprogrammed for the general election. The text printout showed the machine flipped votes in the retention election for two Superior Court judges, but the barcode at the top of the ballot recorded votes correctly. That created confusion about which record — text or barcode — was the official result, and whether voters could trust a barcode they couldn’t read.
Dush’s office has sent draft legislation to counties and to Santarsiero’s office.
Dush’s goal is to send simple, bipartisan, technical election bills to the House with the hopes they won’t get amended, or “Christmas-treed,” with additional reforms. Once the bipartisan, technical changes are accomplished, his committee may get to the harder stuff, he said.
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