HARRISBURG, Pa. – Pennsylvania is seeing lots of action targeting gaps in its vote-by-mail laws. The problem is that it’s in the courtroom and not the legislature.

That could make the most populous presidential swing state a hotbed of challenges and conspiracy theories if the November election is close, as expected.

The state also has a U.S. Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Bob Casey and Republican challenger David McCormick that will help determine control of the chamber, increasing scrutiny on election offices if lawmakers can’t break a partisan stalemate and vote-counting is slowed by mailed ballots.

“Everyone just really feels how high the stakes are in Pennsylvania, being the largest swing state in the country,” said Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based good-government group.

Political gridlock in Pennsylvania over election laws dates to 2019, when a Republican-controlled legislature greatly expanded voting by mail in a compromise with then-Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

Within months, then-President Donald Trump began, without evidence, demonizing voting by mail as rife with fraud, turning Republican voters against it and leading Republican lawmakers to backtrack on their support. He has taken contradictory stances this year — promoting mail voting while also supporting lawsuits against it.

The attacks on mail voting have created partisan battle lines around attempts to fix it in Pennsylvania.

Democrats also want to add early in-person voting, a convenience already adopted by most states, but it’s been a nonstarter for Republicans. Unlike some other states, Pennsylvanian voters can’t change their election laws because the state constitution doesn’t allow citizens to write their own ballot initiatives.

As a result, election-related lawsuits are sprouting in state, federal and county courts, nearly all targeting mail-in voting.

Across the country, Republicans are trying more than ever now to get their voters to vote by mail, a striking change for a party that amplified conspiracy theories about mail ballots in an attempt to explain away Trump’s 2020 loss.

Still, voting by mail remains largely the province of Democrats. In Pennsylvania, roughly three-fourths of mail-in ballots tend to be cast by Democrats.

Among the most important fixes to the state’s mail balloting law is one sought by counties. It would allow local election offices to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day, something nearly every other state with mail voting allows. That would help them produce results more quickly on election night.

Democrats also have sought to resolve a storm of litigation by clarifying the law so that mail-in ballots that lack a handwritten date on the outer envelope, a signature or an inner secrecy envelope can still be counted. Thousands of those ballots get thrown out, although Democratic-leaning counties typically try to help voters fix those errors, so their ballots will count.

Without any fixes in state law, Democrats expect a repeat in November of the chaos around the 2020 election.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair, Sharif Street, said the state is capable of having a fair and well-run election under its existing laws. But, he said, Trump and his allies aren’t interested in that.

“He doesn’t want a smooth process in Pennsylvania or anywhere, because he believes that the chaos benefits him both in the run-up to the election, because he can rally people around saying that ‘There is going to be a steal,’ and then post-election … (he can) point to irregularities to say that he is the rightful winner, when in fact he’s lost,” Street said.

Trump has been sowing doubts about this year’s election for months. At a rally last weekend, he said only widespread fraud could prevent him from getting reelected. “The only way they can beat us is to cheat,” he told supporters in Las Vegas.

Baseless allegations about fraud filled the vacuum during Pennsylvania’s protracted post-election vote count in 2020.

Charlie Gerow, a longtime Republican activist and strategist in Pennsylvania, said the GOP will be prepared to report and document fraud in ways it wasn’t prepared for in that year’s election. To be clear, voter fraud is extremely rare, typically involves just a few ballots and even involves Republican voters — some of whom have cast extra ballots for Trump.

An Associated Press investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud across the six states where Trump disputed his loss, not nearly enough to tip the election. In Pennsylvania alone, Biden beat Trump by more than 80,000 votes.

When Democrats brought legislation to a House vote seeking to let counties process mailed ballots before Election Day — called pre-canvassing — a Republican lawmaker warned it “could lead to various forms of abuse and fraud.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, said he hasn’t heard of a single state where that sort of fraud has occurred.

The legislation passed the Pennsylvania House, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats, but is stalled in the Senate, where majority Republicans are demanding that the House first pass a constitutional amendment to expand voter identification requirements.

“I am very worried about public perception and public concern that our process is not secure, and we need to figure out opportunities to make that process more secure,” said Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, a Republican.

Democratic House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said he also is worried by the legislative stalemate and its potential impact in November.

“We passed pre-canvassing to try to bring some semblance of certainty quickly, to give people a winner as quickly and accurately as possible,” Bradford said. “That has continued to languish.”

Meanwhile, fights over mail voting in the state are piling up in the courts.

One lawsuit by Republican lawmakers would force mail-in ballots to be counted in polling places, rather than county election offices. That would add “immense complexity and burden to election administration,” county governments opposed to the lawsuit said in court documents.

Democrats and left-leaning groups are suing in state and federal courts over the practice of throwing out mail-in ballots with a missing or incorrect handwritten date on the outer envelope.

And at least two Republican-controlled counties are being sued over their refusal to help voters fix technical errors with mail-in ballots — such as a missing date or inner secrecy envelope — to avoid the ballot getting tossed out.

A bright spot is that counties are getting better at counting mail-in ballots.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, 2.6 million voters — nearly 40% of the total in Pennsylvania — cast ballots by mail. That overwhelmed counties and required almost four days of post-election vote-counting before a presidential winner could be declared, deciding the contest.

Counties since then have bought more high-speed processing equipment and fine-tuned their Election Day routines to count more efficiently.

Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, expects to produce results on election night. In 2020, it needed most of the next day.

Philadelphia expects to wrap up most of its counting this fall within roughly 24 hours after polls close, a task that could be finished by election night if given the ability to process the ballots before Election Day.

“That is a very normal practice that happens all over the country,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia. “The fact that we can’t do that in Pennsylvania is what will cause us to not count all the ballots on election night. It is the only cause, and the Legislature could have fixed it.”

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the 2024 election at https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania has failed to live up to its constitutional responsibility to provide an effective defense to people who can’t afford attorneys and will need to spend at least $100 million to fulfill this obligation, the ACLU of Pennsylvania said in a lawsuit filed Thursday.

The group brought the suit on behalf of 17 people facing issues including little to no contact with the public defenders they are entitled to, according to the lawsuit.

It was also filed on behalf of all current and future indigent people, those accused of a crime and unable to pay for a private defense attorney. If the court approves this group as a class, any outcome will extend to all of those affected.

The suit blames the state, not the counties, for failing to properly fund these constitutionally mandated services and names Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, state Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) and state House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) as defendants.

At the moment, Pennsylvania only provides $7.5 million to support indigent defense. Counties must make up the rest with limited local funds, and public defenders’ offices are often shut out from funding opportunities available to prosecutors, the suit asserts citing Spotlight PA reporting.

The suit asks Commonwealth Court to rule the current public defense system unconstitutional and retain oversight until the state fully complies with the constitutional right to counsel.

Rather than seeking damages for specific plaintiffs, the suit is pursuing holistic reform, said ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Vic Walczak.

“You’re trying to change how an institution works — here we’re actually talking about how 67 institutions work,” he told Spotlight PA.

Should the court rule in favor of the petitioners, Pennsylvania officials will likely have an opportunity to propose a remedy in consultation with the ACLU of PA. The process will take years, Walczak said.

In a statement to Spotlight PA, Ward spokesperson Erica Clayton said the senator had yet to receive the lawsuit and would need time to review it before commenting.

McClinton spokesperson Nicole Reigelman wrote that “McClinton started her career as a public defender and knows firsthand the value that indigent defense plays in the judicial system.”

Shapiro spokesperson Manuel Bonder, also in a written statement, highlighted the governor’s proposed and ultimately approved funding for public defense in the 2023 budget.

“Governor Shapiro is the first to acknowledge there is a long way to go — which is why he is focused on delivering real results on this critically important issue,” Bonder wrote.

Shapiro is reviewing the complaint and cannot comment further, Bonder said.

The result of the inadequate support is a system in which too few attorneys are responsible for too many cases, and ultimately cannot provide the level of defense the U.S. and Pennsylvania Constitutions demand, attorneys for the petitioners said at a news briefing Thursday morning.

“The right to counsel is not just the right to a warm body with a law degree standing next to you,” Walczak said during the briefing. “It requires a professional who has the time and resources to prepare an adequate constitutional defense.”

Pennsylvania has not provided consistent funding for indigent defense until this year. Instead, state law has made it the sole responsibility of each of the 67 counties to pay for the federal mandate, a burden many are unable to meet.

In 2023, Shapiro proposed $10 million in state funding for public defense, with the promise of consistent funding in the years to come. The legislature ultimately approved $7.5 million in December, giving most public defenders’ offices their first-ever infusion from the state. Shapiro asked lawmakers to increase that allocation to $10 million in his 2024 budget proposal.

The legislature also created a committee to allocate the money and establish statewide standards for public defense, which previously had not existed. In April, the committee announced each county’s allotment, which ranged from about $90,000 for Potter County to $141,000 for Philadelphia.

But even with this new support, each county’s allotment will not be enough to make up the deficit public defender’s offices face, according to the lawsuit, or even the playing field with prosecutors.

To reach parity with average national spending per capita, or with similar states, Pennsylvania would have to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars, the lawsuit argues, a level of spending that counties cannot accomplish on their own.

“Counties do not have the means to raise revenue in the way the state does,” Walczak said, noting counties also have to pay for competing and more politically attractive public services such as education, health and law enforcement.

“You’re talking about an agency, the office of the public defender, that serves a constituency that has no political clout,” he said. “By definition, they’ve got no resources. So, over the course of the last 50 years, indigent defense services have declined persistently.”

The ACLU of PA alleges that public defense is likely underfunded and inadequate in every county, citing a recent study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and singles out some of Pennsylvania’s rural and sparsely populated counties as particularly unequipped to handle their criminal caseload.

Many of the named petitioners have been incarcerated for months, according to the complaint, but received no contact from a public defender despite attempts to reach out. Others saw attorneys they had never met make legal filings or dismissals with their apparent consent, though none was ever secured.

The suit alleges a part-time public defender in Clearfield County asked petitioner David McCauley to pay him $3,500 for private representation. When McCauley declined, the same attorney showed up to a later hearing as no-cost counsel on behalf of the county public defender’s office.

“We don’t endorse the practices laid out in the complaint,” said Sara Jacobson, executive director of the Public Defender Association of Pennsylvania. “That’s not what clients deserve, but that’s also not what public defenders want to be able to provide.”

When there aren’t enough people available to handle the caseload, attorneys have to triage cases, Jacobson said, because that’s all their funding allows.

The complaint describes a man in Lebanon County trying repeatedly to reach his public defender by mail, only to be awoken one night after seven months of incarceration for a midnight meeting with an attorney.

“Of course that’s awful,” Jacobson said. “I know that public defender, though. She had been at the prison until 2 a.m. because she was in court all day.”

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Pennsylvania promises to be a political battleground for the natural gas industry in the upcoming election cycle. Tensions between the gas sector and clean energy transition goals of a Democratic gubernatorial administration have been on full display in a year already marked by national divisions on energy and climate. Below, Energy Intelligence examines some of the key areas to watch.