Donald Trump is likely to win the most votes in Pennsylvania, but unless he leads by at least 3 percent on Election Day, it is likely that Kamala Harris will be declared the winner.
If that happens, the Republicans will have to take extraordinary steps to dispute the stolen election.
To understand the need for an extra 3 percent, we must review the serious problems of the 2020 election, which remain today.
Two big problems
Pennsylvania does not require ID when voting by mail. That is bad enough. But just before the 2020 election, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court eliminated the only other way to determine if a ballot comes from a real voter: It ended signature matching. That absurd ruling remains in effect for the 2024 election, so there will be no way to determine if mailed ballots are submitted by legitimate voters. Indeed, there will be even less security for the 2024 election because the radical Pennsylvania Supreme Court just ruled that ballots no longer need to be dated.
The problem in Pennsylvania is not just theoretical: It led to an invalid certification of the 2020 election. On Dec. 28, 2020, nearly two months after the 2020 election, 16 members of the Pennsylvania legislature put out an urgent press release warning that 202,377 ballots (nearly 3 percent of the total vote) had not been matched to registered voters.
In response, the state’s Secretary of State said, effectively, the “check is in the mail.” These were her words (almost two months after the election):
…some counties have not yet finished entering into the SURE system what are called voter histories. Each history is tied to the record of the individual voter who cast a ballot… [T]hese counties included Philadelphia, Allegheny, Butler and Cambria, which would account for a significant number of voters…
The Secretary’s explanation was good enough for mainstream media “fact checkers,” who immediately declared that the problem raised by 16 Republican legislators was “debunked.” But no one in media bothered to follow up to see if the ballots were finally matched to registered voters. I can tell you, factually, they were not.
We should know that Trump won the election by midnight