But the rules for voting by mail in Pennsylvania—and in particular, the deadline by which county boards of elections must receive completed absentee and mail-in ballots—were written for a pre-pandemic world. The deadline for Pennsylvania voters to apply for an absentee or mail-in ballot is just one week before election day. For the many voters who apply for a ballot on or near this deadline, a number of things need to happen in the short span of a week for these voters to have their votes counted. First, the county board of elections must process the application, review and approve it, and send the voter a ballot via the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). County election officials have testified that this manual review process has already created a “bottleneck” because counties are just “not built” to handle the unprecedented number of applications. Id. at 1. Counties “are falling behind daily,” and given the “exponential explosions of applications” expected “in the weeks leading up to” the June 2 primary, officials have warned that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.” Id. at 2. And once a county board of elections processes and approves a voter’s application, USPS must deliver the ballot to the voter, and USPS is experiencing its own delays due to the pandemic.

As a result of these delays, tens or even hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who timely request an absentee or mail-in ballot will receive the ballot only days (or less) before the June 2 primary. At that point, the voter cannot be sure that if she mails the ballot it will be received by the board of elections by election day. These voters will then face a choice: either mail the absentee or mail-in ballot and risk that it will arrive too late and will not be counted, or vote in person and risk their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors.