Dolores Troiani: The descent into lawlessness

Sometimes the descent into lawlessness is easy to see. 

Although California did not enact legislation proclaiming that anyone who steals property valued at less than $900 does not commit a crime, videos of swarms of criminals descending upon high-end stores to take what  they wanted fueled that misconception. What California did was more subtle: they downgraded those thefts to  misdemeanors, which are rarely investigated. The effect was the same, but now legislators have plausible deniability. 

On November 17, 2025, the majority of the Chester County Commissioners were not subtle.

They declared that election laws do not apply to Chester County elections when they, sitting as the Board of Elections, make a mistake. In effect they argued, “I know I burned down your house, but I told you it was an accident, and I said I was sorry. Now you want to know why and how. What more do you want? The house is gone. Besides, I’ll pick someone to investigate. Why are you being so mean to me?”

The unofficial explanation for what happened in the November 4, 2025, election is that a recently hired Voter Services employee and their newly hired supervisor failed to include unaffiliated voters in the poll books that  were sent to the polling places. As a result, over 12,400 people had to vote by provisional ballot. They do not even mention the ones who voted regularly, without any ability to verify their identity before their vote was commingled with verified voters. 

There were very few races where the inclusion of the disputed provisional ballots would change the outcome. In essence, the majority commissioners argued: why not just concede? Accept the apology and move on. Stop disenfranchising voters-we already did that, and now we can do it again and again. 

In a Facebook post made prior to the hearing, Commissioner Maxwell told us we were “making the Republicans look bad.” On social media, in text messages, and in emails, supporters of the majority commissioners urged voters to come to the hearing whose outcome Commissioner Maxwell had already predetermined. They asked voters to tell Republicans they were the bad guys. At the hearing, occasionally someone snuck in who accurately placed the blame where it belonged, and one poll worker tearfully admitted her mistake. 

This hearing was not about counting votes that would not change the outcome. This was about that pesky rule of law thing. In the end, Commissioners Maxwell and Moskowitz decided that even when the election law is perfectly clear — provisional ballots lacking secrecy envelopes shall not be counted — they would count them anyway, simply because the underlying error was their own. But don’t worry, they told us: if they make a mistake in a  future election, they will not rely upon this decision as precedent. Believe them. They will make another “mistake.” And they will disregard the law again — this time citing the new mistake. We can be sure of that.

Dolores Troiani is the Solicitor of the Republican Committee of Chester County.