Trending
From a distance, it may look petty and political.
The Pennsylvania Senate's Republican majority is questioning the residency qualifications of a newly elected Democrat who flipped a Republican-held, Pittsburgh-area seat by a mere 793 votes.
A vote against seating Democrat Lindsey Williams could turn the celibatory Jan. 1 swearing-in day into a tense rather than family event. And that could get politically ugly for Republicans.
But the principle they are addressing needs to be valued, regardless of party affiliation.
Election regulations require that candidates be residents of the district they are running in for four years prior to election day. Williams has maintained she obtained a job offer with the Pennsylvania Federation of Teachers in the days before Nov. 6, 2014, and had begun moving things from Maryland and finding an apartment by then.
But there's a Maryland address on a speeding ticket she received in November 2014 and her voter registration card in Pennsylvania is dated December 2014. Her social media posts suggest she was working at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington, D.C. through November of 2014.
Republican senators insist they are not pre-judging Williams. They merely want to see evidence that she is meeting the residency requirements outlined in the state constitution.
And in our view, the constitution should take precedence over all other consideration, including the inconvenience of a special election next year.
Nationwide, we see candidates for various offices in states where they are not traditional residents. That reduces the value of representation. At all levels of government, people are supposed to represent constituents they have lived with.
That principle is being diluted in favor of residency tweaking for political advantages.
And we oppose anything that reduces the power of representative democracy.