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Pennsylvania has earned its national embarrassment for its handling of the 2020 presidential election.
The shame is that casual observers probably do not realize only a few of Pennsylvania's counties -- the entities that administrate the election -- had difficulties processing votes without prompting questions.
The questions ranged from the manner in which mail-in ballots were cast, the mysteries of computer-generated results, the validity of voting rolls and voter signatures and a myriad of circumstances suggesting fraudulent activity.
But those things were an issue in only a few of the state's counties. In most counties, including those in our region, election officials and thousands of volunteers handled the process -- in a pandemic year that presented its own set of unique challenges -- with efficiency and integrity.
With that in mind, we support the thinking of Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.
She believes the state's counties can offer recommendations to the Legislature and administration for future elections based on their experiences to promote smoother processing. She believes that should happen when the Legislature returns in January.
Schaefer has called on Gov. Tom Wolf and the Legislature to urge the convening of the newly created Election Law Advisory Board to collaborate with the county governments, General Assembly, administration and other stakeholders to study election-related issues.
Recommendations should be made to ensure elections are fair and secure, with timely and accurate results, Schaefer said.
Since its formation in May, the board has not met once. In retrospect, it looks like they should have been meeting a lot in the months before the election.
But they need to do their job now, along with the Legislature and administration.
Only the most naive, hyper-partisan person believes this election was handled smoothly and with integrity in a few of the state's most populous counties. We can't have that going forward. The goal of any election should be integrity and accuracy that commands respect of the results, even among those whose preference was defeated.
Even if we assume there were no hijinks attached to this voting process and the results in a few of Pennsylvania's counties -- a huge assumption -- the counting was too slow and too questionable to merit confidence in the numbers from those counties.
The discussion on how to improve Pennsylvania's election process should start with the counties that embarrassed our state reviewing why and how the rest of the counties handled everything so smoothly. And how they handled everything so questionably.