"In Pennsylvania any registered voter can request on-line a mail ballot. Pennsylvania does not have signature verification. All the requirements are by self authentication And everything, except the mail ballot, is online without showing anybody any verification."
I believe you'll find all of these provisions in Act 77 enacted in 2019. Hre is the link...
Now correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not) but I believe the Legislature which enacted this bill in 2019 was controlled by The GOP. The act was a compromise between GOP Legislators who wanted to eliminat state ticket ballots and Dems who wanted to allow for no excuse needed absentee balloting. I don't think the GOP was even that opposed to the concept, till up until that time absentee ballots were largely the purview of the GOP. In fact it was only a year later when Trump started whining that Republicans started to characterize expanding absentee ballots as "evil"...
You know OH,FL and PA all have early mail and in person voting. OH and FL were both able to declare their winner on election night because the early votes were opened and prepped for counting prior to election day. n both states Biden had a lead based on early returns but as election day ballots were tallied Trump ended up winning. Easy Peasy...
But rather than adopt a similar procedure for processing early votes, PA insists on processing early votes last. Again it's that GOP controlled Legislature mandating that mail/early ballots can't even be opened till election day, and can't be counted till election day ballots are already counted and added in...
Now I wonder who has a vested interest in the continued application of such a policy? Not only was this a concerted effort on Trump's part to pretend to be ahead, but he also unscrupiously tried to use this fake lead as a justification to have a 3am press conference claiming he "won".
Trump knew that if PA's early votes were counted first then operation "red mirage" couldn't be implemented. Simple math tells you that with the amount of early ballots to be counted and Trump discouraging his followers from Early/mail voting that Trump's "lead" was illusionary with record numbers of early votes yet to be tallied. So Trump pressured the GOP Legislators not to modify the procedure to make things more convenient...
It wasn't a huge secret. That's why the Dems were completely prepared with legal teams and experts in every contested state. Hell even I was aware of what Trump was going to try to do. Here's an article from Oct 31 warning about the "red mirage" and explaining what Trump was up to.
The situation could develop if the president appears to be leading on election night before all votes are counted – and for some officials, it’s too realistic for words
www.theguardian.com