Secretary Boockvar’s Last-Minute Differential Ballot-Curing Guidance – Government-Authored Information Asymmetry in Election Administration (PA)

[Established Fact – As to guidance issuance and non-uniform application] Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance to select Pennsylvania counties on the evening of November 2, 2020 – the night before Election Day – encouraging certain counties to notify party representatives of defective mail-in ballot envelopes before Election Day. This guidance was not uniformly transmitted to all counties, creating a situation in which:

1. voters in some counties were assisted in curing ballot defects before Election Day;
2. voters in other counties were not similarly assisted; and
3. the differential application of this guidance itself constituted an official government-authored information asymmetry that created different election-administration realities in different counties without statutory authorization.

The last-minute, non-uniform character of the guidance – transmitted the night before the election, after counties had completed their pre-election preparations – created conditions in which legitimate disputes about legal compliance were deliberately obscured by the timing. This is a different form of information control from the EIP censorship apparatus, but it represents the same structural dynamic: official actors managed what information reached which voters and county officials, with outcomes that were not random or uniform but favorable to one side.