Well, howdy there, Internet people? It's Bell again. So today, we're going to talk about

SCOTUS, Pennsylvania, a GOP loss, and what it means. The Supreme Court of the United States

handed the Republican Party a loss when it decided to leave a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in

place.

The ruling deals with mail-in ballots and provisional ballots.

In Pennsylvania, there are very strict rules governing how a mail-in ballot must be returned.

The short version is they need two envelopes, the normal mailing envelope, and then an inner secrecy envelope.

If the ballot doesn't have an inner secrecy envelope, it's considered a naked ballot and is void. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied simple logic. If a ballot without the inner

envelope is automatically void and cannot be counted, then election officials never received a ballot without the inner envelope is automatically void and cannot be counted,

then election officials never received a ballot from the person who mailed it,

and therefore they could be notified via email and cast a provisional ballot.

Its simple logic and its application allows more people to vote.

Predictably, the Republican Party took issue with the idea. Not allowing the provisional ballots would likely have disenfranchised thousands of voters.

The logic for the Republican Party seems pretty simple and easy to follow as well.

More Democrats vote via mail-in ballot than Republicans

in Pennsylvania. Therefore, even if they disenfranchise some of their own voters, they'd likely

block more Democrats. Obviously, that's not how they argued it. They basically said the Pennsylvania

court decisions dramatically altered the rules

and undermined the state legislature's role in elections. That's the other interesting tidbit in this

particular case. The Republican Party's arguments stemmed from something called the independent

state legislature theory or doctrine.

It's an idea the Supreme Court has shot down repeatedly in various ways.

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