Thread by @Redistrict

Today’s PA Supreme Court rulings on postmark deadline, Green Party & drop boxes have been hailed as big victories for Biden. But overall, I’m not so sure Biden got the better end of these rulings. 1/ cnbc.com/2020/09/17/202…

The court sided w/ Trump to reject so-called “naked ballots” - mail ballots that voters forgot to enclose in secrecy envelopes. In the June primary, in at least one county over 5% (!) of mail voters failed to enclose their votes in the inner envelope. sharonherald.com/news/lawrence-…

The reason? Most PA voters have little experience voting by mail.

If 50% of Dems were to vote by mail and only 10% of Reps did, and 5% of ballots were rejected, Biden could be docked 2.5% of his votes and Trump docked only 0.5%.

In PA, that could potentially be enormous.

Moreover, the court declined to mandate a “cure” regime for election boards to notify voters of ballot defects and to ensure voters have the opportunity to fix their rejected ballots. That’s quite different from many other states and could prove meaningful in a close race.

Put another way: let’s say there are 3 million Biden voters in PA. 50% of them prefer to vote by mail, but 4% of them send their ballots back “naked,” forget to sign in the right place, etc.

That would be 60k votes out the window. Trump’s PA margin in 2016 was 44k.

/end

P.s. I didn’t totally pull these numbers out of thin air. The most recent @QuinnipiacPoll of PA a few weeks back showed 47% of Ds planning to vote by mail vs. 13% of Rs.

It would, however, be great to have more robust county-level data on “naked ballots” from the June primary.