An Independent’s Take on Pennsylvania’s 2020 Election

Hit Ctl-F and search “What the Republicans say about 2020” to skip the build up.
Sources at end of this page.
Some research conducted and charts built using AI: ChatGPT Instant 5.3 model.
I have a bunch of reading available about the 2020 election here. Email me if you want access to this page which a ton of reading material links.

First, the numbers for voting across 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 do not exist as a consistent dataset across all those years. This is because Pennsylvania did not have “no excuse” mail-in voting before 2020. Only limited “absentee” ballots were allowed, and there was no state wide reporting by party for absentee ballots, at least for presidential elections.

In 2019, Act 77 changed things: it was the start of no excuse mail-in voting and the first election where it was used was 2020.

The Big Change: 2020 Presidential Election – Mail-In Ballots

  • Total mail-in ballots returned: about 2.63 million (2016 was about 10 times smaller than 2020)
  • By party:
    • Democrat: 1,702,484
    • Republican: 623,404
    • No affiliation: 283,673
    • Other: 20,111 

The Rebound: 2024

  • Pennsylvania does report totals but party breakdowns are muddy partly because the state’s decentralized voting system is not standardized. This of course gives rise to imagining all kinds of malfeasance is happening, and it should. It has happened at times in the history of voting.
  • But at the end of the day, the Republicans figured out mail-in voting and closed the large gap seen in 2020 between Rs and Ds voting by mail in the state.

This chart was one of the things created with help from ChatGTP.

YearMail systemTotal mail-in ballotsParty breakdown available?
2008Absentee onlyLow (~hundreds of thousands)❌ No
2012Absentee onlyLow❌ No
2016Absentee only~200k–300k❌ No
2020Full mail-in~2.63M✅ Yes (D ~65%, R ~24%)
2024Full mail-inHigh (below 2020)⚠️ Partial / fragmented

The 2020 Presidential Election in Pennsylvania was decided by Mail-In Ballots

  • Democrats in 2020 mailed in about 1.7MM ballots
  • Republicans mailed in about 0.62MM ballots

This gave the Democrats a mail-in advantage of more than 1MM ballots. On election day itself, Republicans showed a strong advantage for in-person voting, to the tune of more than 600K votes. By Thursday or so that week, the counting of mail-in ballots completely overwhelmed any Republican in-person advantage, making mail-in voting the decisive factor in the election. This is not because they were counted late, but for various reasons including holding onto tradition, having party leaders all the way to the top discourage mail-in voting, and massive grass roots get-the-(by mail)-vote-out efforts in urban areas.

This completely pissed off my Republican friends, one of whom is a shaker-and-mover in the party, travels to meet Washington contacts, and is always talking down Ds. The big thing he noted was that Trump (won), and then later it was reversed by cheating. Without evidence, he fumed about how the Democrats cheated their way to the election. One observation I will make here is that many of my Republican friends are very “devout” and they treat Democrats as stupid, lame, losers, cheaters, short sighted, on the wrong side of history, fooling themselves, delusional — you get the idea. I personally take all that with a grain of salt. My Democrat friends generally are very closed minded about Rs and denigrate them as well. The most disconcerting thing to me is that so many people I know stop listening when anyone tries to talk about politics in an unbiased way. It’s very weird to see it happen but they don’t seem to notice.

But… the idea that one party showed such an advantage in mail in voting was an eye opener for me and should be for anyone.

The bottom line is that Biden won by about 80,000 votes and it is pretty obvious that without mail-in voting, Trump would have won. So the Republicans cried foul. If the fortunes were reversed, the Democrats would have cried foul. I see more sour grapes than any kind of true fraud in the situation. If mail-in voting lets more people vote, so be it. But there is more to this.

The 2024 “Landslide”

The 2024 Presidential election, counter to what many people claim, was not a landslide. See Mondale – Reagan for a landslide, and many other elections. But “landslide” is a useless term in my opinion. More importantly, for the 2020 election, many voting blocs (almost all of them) moved significantly right, and in amounts that were significant. Here is one of many articles detailing this.

But back to mail-in voting. In 2024 Pennsylvania, Democrats still led in the numbers but at far smaller levels – but they still had a mail-in advantage of about half a million mail in votes. This translates to more than half of the Ds mailing in votes but only about a third of Rs doing the same. So factors still conspire to make many Republicans dislike mail-in voting enough to not use it.

Election day in-person voting changed very little from 2020 to 2024. All in all this still gave the Ds an advantage in mail-in ballots but the voting shift across most demographics overwhelmed this.

2024 showed that 2020 was a voting anomaly for Pennsylvania. In 2020, Trump discouraged mail in voting to his supporters. He, incidently, voted by mail himself from Florida. I just love politics. Mail-in voting created a pretty extreme partisan split that year, partly because of discouragement aimed at the Rs and partly because of Covid. Anecdotally, it makes sense to me that more Ds voted via mail because of Covid because my D friends tended to be much more fearful or respectful of Covid than my R friends, to a degree that surprised me.

At the end of the day, 2024 was far less about voting in-person versus mail-in and far more about economics, reverting the voting ecosystem to mean, where 2020 was decided by mail-in ballots and 2024 closed the R/D mail-in ballot gap and reverted to being about turnout and persuading voters.

Another chart built with help from ChatGPT:

Metric20202024 (estimated)
D mail share~65%~55–60%
R mail share~24%~30–35%
D mail margin~+1.08M~+400k–600k
R in-person margin~+600–700kSlightly lower
ImpactDecisiveStill important, less dominance

Philadelphia

Philly area includes the counties of Philadelphia, Delaware, Chester and Bucks. This area is heavily democratic as most urban areas are. Up to 85% of votes there come from mail-in ballots. And they have a true political machine there, that much has been written about elsewhere. They also have documented cases of fraud large enough to swing an election as documented here.

Philadelphia alone accounted for almost half a million Biden margin votes in 2020, providing the bulk of the D advantage state wide. That, combined with Trump demonizing the corruption in voting in Philadelphia historically caused even more rise in misinformation. Misinformation often takes hold when there is a grain of truth behind its assertions.

By 2024, the trend of large D majority voting held in the Philly area but the Rs increased their share a little in the suburbs.

Pittsburgh

In 2020, up to 75% of Ds voted by mail, giving Biden a 150K margin advantage and this slightly tightened up in 2024, but remained a reliable mail-in source for the Ds, albeit much smaller than Philly.

The Rest of Use, or, Living in the “T”

As per usual, the T is a strong Republican area. Pennsylvania is sometimes called Pittsburgh, Philly and Alabama in the middle. In 2020, the Rs tended to avoid mail-in ballots to a great extent and were very strong for in-person voting. So mail-in ballots favored the Ds in the T also. On election day, vote totals favored the Republicans by large margins, but as mail-in votes were counted over the next few days, that in-person advantage was overwhelmed by the urban volume. People I talk to in the T often cite seeing hundreds of Trump signs in yards, and overwhelming support for Trump in the T — for evidence that the election of 2020 was stolen. They often overlook their own bias of thinking the T has more influence and population than it does.

By 2024, the Rs were able to encourage and thus increase mail-in voting, increasing the effect of rural Republican mail-in totals and reducing the statewide Democratic advantage.

At the end of the day, in 2020, Pennsylvania was decided by about 80,000 votes, with mail-in ballots being the deciding factor, and they were counted late, causing Republicans to move from happy at winning by the end of election day, to sad at losing by the end of election week. I certainly understand the frustration and the realization that they had been “had” by mail-in voting. What the Rs needed to do and failed to was to trim the Ds suburban advantage in counties around Philadelphia and Allentown where there are both large numbers of voters and many swing voters. Pennsylvania is often decided thus: Philly-Pittsburgh-Surrounds go big for D, the T goes big for R and if the Rs can get voters to go their way in big D counties, the Rs win.

I am sympathetic to a few of the R arguments of the 2020 Pennsylvania election, but feel they simply failed to create a strategy to take advantage of the new voting system, and to some extent, still have failed at that mission. I know conservatives conserve tradition, but tradition changes, too.

What the Republicans say about 2020

  • even if not outright fraudulent, Act 77 and its interpretation gave the Ds an unfair procedural advantage (with many people citing outright fraud, based on a textualist view of Act 77)
  • the 2020 mail-in voting expansion (Act 77) created per state law by the legislature:
    • was not applied consistently with existing law
      • extended deadlines
      • relaxed signature matching
    • caused equal protection issues
      • allowing counties to “cure” ballots differently
        (cure means fixing errors on ballots to allow them to be counted))
    • created an unfair advantage for Ds
    • was altered by the courts and officials, without legislative approval which undermined the legality of Act 77 (this is mostly the textualist view)
    • created chain of custody issues
      • ballot box drop offs
      • handling of ballots by third parties in some cases
    • reduced security
      • in person verification
      • ID checks
    • increased abuse opportunities
    • created a perception of structural advantage when so many Ds voted by mail versus the Rs
    • reduced public confidence in voting and appearance of transparency when sudden large vote swings occurred

What the Democrats say about the 2020 election

  • Act 77 was passed by an R governor and an R legislature
  • adjustments (e.g., deadlines, collection of ballots, curing) were made through the standard process of the courts interpreting the law
  • challenges were dismissed for standing or lack of evidence numerous times by both federal and state courts, with judges appointed by both Rs and Ds
  • legitimacy was upheld by the courts and elections official virtually universally
  • audits, recounts and investigations showed no at-scale fraud
  • mail-in voting was allowed during Covid restrictions to help shut-in have the chance to vote
  • mail-in voting was available equally to all voters regardless of party affiliation, so it was fair access
  • gaps in mail-in usage reflect party voter choice, party messaging and campaign strategy, not fraud
  • variations by county in Pennsylvania are historically normal and lawful and not unique to 2020
  • chain of custody was strong and multi layered: bar code tracking, signature verification, secure monitored drop boxes
  • late-shift voting tallies were because of Pennsylvania state law — preventing mail-in ballots being counted early, and mail-in ballots greatly favored Democrats
  • courts reviewed unequal protection claims and found no constitutional violation
  • all of the legal support for mail-in voting in Pennsylvania went all the was to SCOTUS, with an R majority

Sources

Certified results (vote totals, margins)

Mail Ballot Volume and Party Breakdown

2020 early/mail voting dataset

Legal Framework (Mail Voting Law)

Act 77 (2019)

Court Cases and Legal Rulings

Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions

  • Pennsylvania Democratic Party v. Boockvar
    • Addressed ballot receipt deadlines

U.S. Supreme Court related actions

  • Multiple emergency applications (declined to overturn PA rulings)

Aggregated legal tracking

Audits, Fraud Claims, and Investigations

Federal and state findings

  • U.S. Department of Justice
    • Statement (Dec 2020): no evidence of widespread fraud
  • Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
    • Called 2020 election “most secure in American history”

Pennsylvania-specific reviews

  • Pennsylvania Department of State
    • Risk-limiting audits and reviews confirmed results

Academic / Policy Analysis

Mail voting and turnout research

  • National Bureau of Economic Research
  • MIT Election Data and Science Lab

Findings used:

  • Mail voting increases access
  • Does not systematically advantage one party structurally

County-Level Context & Results Summaries

Aggregated summaries

(Note: Wikipedia compiles from official state data; not primary but useful for quick reference.)

Structural / Process Explanations

Election administration

  • National Association of Counties
    • Context on decentralized election systems

Media + process explanations

  • Major outlets (NYT, WSJ, AP) used for:
    • “Red mirage / blue shift” explanation
    • Mail ballot timing dynamics

What Is Estimated vs. Exact

Exact (from sources)

  • Statewide vote totals
  • County margins
  • Total mail ballot counts
  • Party registration of mail voters (2020)

Estimated (clearly labeled in prior responses)

  • County-level mail ballot margins
    • Not officially published in a clean dataset
    • Derived from:
      • Registration data
      • Known voting patterns
      • Academic and media analyses

Bottom Line on Sources

  • Hard data: PA Dept. of State, U.S. Elections Project
  • Legal validation: State + federal courts, DOJ, CISA
  • Context and interpretation: Academic research + policy orgs
  • County summaries: Derived from official results