Westmoreland's mistaken practice of allowing age-based absentee voting ends

A week after Westmoreland County acknowledged it erred in allowing several hundred voters to improperly cast absentee ballots in this month's general election, officials are still trying to figure out why it occurred.

“The only thing we can really surmise is that what happened was a misinterpretation of the law,” said Beth Lechman, the county's election bureau director.

Voting officials allowed 278 people to cast absentee ballots for the Nov. 7 election solely because they were 65 and older. That accounted for 16 percent of nearly 1,700 absentee ballots submitted countywide. Voters cast 65,770 total ballots on Election Day in Westmoreland County, according to unofficial results from the election bureau.

Under state law, absentee ballots may be requested by voters who are out of town during an election, in the military or have work obligations that would prevent them from voting on Election Day. Age is not a prescribed reason for voting via absentee ballot.

This is the voting detail for my home county of Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. All the blue areas voter for Trump. In fact, Westmoreland County provided 128.4% of Trump's margin in the entire Commonwealth. You can look it up. As recently as the 1984 Reagan landslide, Walter Mondale actually carried Westmoreland County-- that's how much we've changed!

See that little red dot in the southwest corner of the county? That is Monessen, one of only two places Hillary carried. The Mayor of Monessen (a Democrat as is most of the city) actually invited Trump to come and hold a rally there in 2016. He did and the local Democrat machine was furious. The primary was supposed to be payback time when he would be defeated. It didn't quite work out so easily as Trump allies signed up in droves to vote absentee.

This is the reason for the flap . . . they could've just cited a disability or difficulty getting to the polls and there would've been no reason to deny them an absentee ballot . . . but this example just goes to show that for all their cries about making voting easier, they only mean people likely to vote for them.

Who knew?

A few election cycles ago I happened to be visiting a friend in a nursing home. There were people wandering the hallways “helping” the residents vote. I don’t remember the specifics now but I got the impression the “helpers” were Democrats.

Same in Texas, go in early and vote.

Mailing in ballots is actually risky because cronies at the post office have been known to deliberately delay the return of such mail in a timely fashion (especially military ballots).

On the one hand, they absolutely should follow the law as written.

On the other hand, this is tremendous Democrat hypocrisy, suing to stop absentee ballots from being counted.

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