Editorial: Is this the right year to cut ballot drop boxes, Westmoreland County?

If you are a Westmoreland County voter who uses the drop box at the courthouse to cast your ballot, you are out of luck.

On Wednesday, a plan to provide that option again died. It wasn’t that it was voted down. Commissioner Gina Cerilli Thrasher put it on the table. Commissioners Sean Kertes and Doug Chew declined to even consider it for a vote.

This is not terribly surprising. It follows a party-line attitude toward voting access in the current political climate, particularly around mail-in or absentee voting. Cerilli Thrasher, a Democrat, supported it; her Republican colleagues opposed. Nothing about that is shocking.

But it isn’t just a party thing. Democrat-heavy Allegheny County also scaled back its drop-off availability since its 2020 pandemic peak.

So is the no-excuse mail-in voting afforded by the GOP-supported Act 77 election reforms — which have since become a Republican regret since the 2020 election — a good thing? Maybe. Maybe not. That isn’t the point when we are talking about Westmoreland this year.

The bigger issue is that without the single drop-off box that was being provided at the courthouse, responsible Westmoreland citizens looking to cast their vote by the legally provided ballot have two options: They can send it in the mail, which might not work depending on the date. Or they can go to the elections office. Simple enough, right?

In 2020, sure. Today, not so much.

The courthouse is the middle of garage renovations that make access challenging, to put it mildly. There are parking issues. Entry to the building has been rerouted from the closed-off front. The commissioners might not find it daunting, but for someone who doesn’t come downtown or to the courthouse often, that could be a different story.

Maybe Chew has a point when he says the cost of the drop box per ballot submitted is too high. Certainly, the cost of boxes across the county was higher in 2020 and 2021 than it was for the primary when there was just one box at the courthouse.

When you are talking about people’s right to exercise their responsibility to vote, budget is important — but so is accessibility.