Why Pennsylvania may experience 2020 election déjà vu in 2024

Why it matters: The Keystone State is among the presidential race toss-ups where margins could be even closer than in 2020.

• "It is a near guarantee that Donald Trump will declare victory the night of Nov. 5 and the margin won't matter — it won't matter whether he's accurate and he actually won, or whether he was defeated soundly," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Axios.

Context: Trump calls voting by mail "corrupt" but has increasingly encouraged his GOP allies to take advantage of it, if necessary. He repeatedly has dodged questions about whether he'll accept the 2024 election results if he loses.

• He's threatened to seek to imprison anyone who engages in "unscrupulous" election behavior, and he's warned law enforcement to "watch for voter fraud."
• Trump's campaign and allies say they've recruited roughly 175,000 poll workers and poll watchers, an effort that Democrats worry may lead to voter intimidation.

Flashback: In 2020, early returns showed Trump ahead, but as more votes were processed, Joe Biden's victory took shape. Yet Trump prematurely declared victory in states like Pennsylvania (which he ultimately lost).

• Experts had predicted this, especially given Democrats' pandemic-era embrace of mail-in voting.
• Some call it the "blue shift" — when Election Day results favor Republicans, but absentee and mail-in ballots counted later heavily favor Democrats.

Reality check: The MIT Election Data and Science Lab found that the pattern of results in 2020 wasn't much of an anomaly from 2016, and that the share of votes counted after Election Day was similar in both elections.

• The difference, however, was the "willful misrepresentation of the patterns" in certain key states, researchers wrote.

Zoom in: County election officials are sounding the alarm that it again will probably take days to count ballots in Pennsylvania, which doesn't allow election offices to begin opening mail-in ballots until 7am on Election Day.

• State House Democrats pushed legislation in April to allow an additional week to prepare for mail-in ballots to be counted — also known as pre-canvassing, the Inquirer reports. But that measure stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania has seen several mail-in ballot challenges in the months leading up to the election.

The latest: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday ruled that undated or improperly dated mail-in ballots should be rejected, reversing a state court ruling last month that would've allowed them to be counted.

• The decision was based on procedural grounds, and it sidestepped the constitutional implications of whether the requirement disenfranchises voters.

• Ultimately, the state Supreme Court ruled that the lower court didn't have jurisdiction to decide the issue because not all 67 Pennsylvania counties were named in the lawsuit.

Context: Pennsylvania tweaked its mail-in ballot process last year to reduce the errors that led to disqualified ballots.

• The changes included redesigning envelopes with clearer instructions on how to fill out and return mail-in ballots.
• But more than 8,500 ballots were still rejected in the April primary — about half of which were due to dating errors, per Spotlight PA.

What we're watching: Separate legal challenges to Pennsylvania's dating requirement are ongoing, the Inquirer reports.

• In another case, Butler County is appealing a court ruling giving voters a second chance to cast provisional ballots if they mess up their mail-in ballots.

What they're saying: Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt tells Axios that combating misinformation and protecting election workers are among his top priorities this election.

• Pennsylvania is prepared for the possibility of election-related violence, Schmidt said.
• It created a task force to investigate election threats and prevent voter intimidation at the polls and actively monitors social media for misinformation, debunking false claims on a fact-checking page.

The bottom line: Schmidt, who testified against Trump's baseless election fraud claims in the 2020 election, said the state's elections "have never been more safe and secure."

• "If there are lies that get traction, we make sure to share the truth," he said.