Opponents of mail-in voting are having a field day after the recent disclosure that hundreds of people in Lehigh County broke the law by dropping more than one mail-in ballot at county-sanctioned drop boxes during last November’s general election.

This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed, agreed Lehigh District Attorney James Martin, but it doesn’t mean that we should abandon mail-in voting, which has been so popular and convenient for so many Pennsylvanians, especially at a time when there is considerable concern about the spread of COVID-19 and its multiple variants.

The Lehigh County disclosure came following an investigation by the Lehigh County District Attorney’s office, launched after a complaint was made by Joseph Vichot, chair of the county Republican Committee.

Long-serving Republican DA Martin said his office spot-checked video surveillance from five county-approved drop box locations and found that nearly 300 people dropped in more than one ballot.

It is likely that at least some of them unknowingly broke the law because they were unaware of the requirement that only their ballot can be deposited, not those of family members and, possibly, friends.

In an unscientific survey of 10 people I knew who voted in this manner last fall, I found four were unaware that such a law exists and deposited the ballots of a spouse or other household member such as a son or daughter.

You may recall that last fall even Gov. Tom Wolf, unaware of the law, revealed that his wife, Frances, had dropped off his mail-in ballot along with her own.

There is a judicial principle which says that “ignorance of the law excuses no one,” so will Wolf and the Lehigh County violators who were identified be held liable? Apparently not. Violation of the drop box law is punishable by up to a year in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.

Martin views what happens as technical violations rather than attempts at fraud. In many cases, he said, it was impossible to tell how many ballots were being deposited. Among those who broke the rules, it appears as if they dropped one or two other ballots, Martin said, a few even more than that.

He said that most people were wearing masks because of the COVID-19 pandemic, so identifying everyone is “next to impossible.”

As a result of this, Martin said no one will be prosecuted. “… To prosecute those few whose identity can be proven would be unfair and unjust given the much larger numbers who cannot be identified and who also deposited multiple ballots,” Martin said in a news release.

Acknowledging that the concerns about the violations are “well-founded,” Martin suggests that in the future ballots be delivered in person to an election official.

Despite this troubling disclosure, we should not conclude that the ballots themselves were defective or that this was some massive fraudulent attempt to undermine the 2021 general election, but this is precisely what some lawmakers are claiming in an effort to reinforce their attacks on the security and integrity of our voting system.

What needs to be done is to fix this flaw in the mail-in voting law, which can be done easily so long as our Republican and Democratic legislators do not engage in political grandstanding for point-scoring rather than deal with the problem.

Rep. Mike Schlossberg, D-Lehigh, said that the Legislature needs to fix the flaw so “we don’t make criminals” out of those who are just trying to cast their ballots. Meanwhile, Rep. Gary Day, R-Lehigh, said he is authoring a series of bills that would address this flaw and other issues in the mail-in voting law that was passed in 2019 and first used in the 2020 primaries.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.