State Sen. Jake Corman’s pragmatic approach to election reform is exactly what the state needs in the wake of controversy that surrounded voting in 2020.

We applaud the move by Corman, R-Bellefonte, the president pro tempore of the state Senate whose district includes Mifflin and Juniata counties, to remove colleague Doug Mastriano from the process. Mastriano seemed more intent on political grandstanding than in addressing real problems, and his allegations of fraud were largely the same as those brought forth by former President Donald Trump in the weeks following November’s general election — claims that were repeatedly tossed from court, even by Trump-appointed judges, as being baseless.

We hear from readers regularly asking why, if the outcome of the election is correct, there should be a need for investigation — or for that matter, for new laws guiding the voting process. The answer has not changed since we first wrote about this issue, and it is the same one offered by Corman as he and the Senate move forward with their constitutional obligation: The voters must have faith that an election is being conducted fairly and impartially.

And there is no doubt that did not happen in Pennsylvania last year.

It’s not about who won — it’s about the way a single member of state government violated the law. Whether her actions were in an honest effort to accommodate pandemic voting or were a partisan effort to change the election’s outcome, the 11th-hour rule changes by someone who, by any reading of the state constitution, has no right to do so made many suspect there was fraud.

Even worse, a partisan state Supreme Court backed her up, overlooking the constitutional mandate that gives the legislature — and only the legislature — the right to dictate how voting should take place. The court entered the political fray when it chose to look the other way while the rules were being broken.

It’s not about voting by mail, which is not new — it’s been around since the 1800s, and is how our military and other citizens overseas have voted for decades. It’s about believing that the ballots were not tampered with, that they were securely delivered and that spoiled ballots — those that fail to meet the legal standard — are discarded.

It is about making sure only those eligible to vote cast ballots. In small towns like the ones we live in, the folks at the polls know us and there is rarely a question. But in our cities, it would be only too easy to vote in someone’s place without proof of identification — the same kind of ID you need for numerous other functions of life, one that no one questions until they use it as a means of accusing anyone who disagrees with them of racism.

And most of all, it’s demonstrating that every voter is playing by the same rules statewide, and that none of the modern electronic devices used for voting are at risk of being compromised.

The pandemic caught us by surprise and the system was not designed to handle it. The legislature, not the executive branch or the courts, is tasked with setting the parameters in which we cast ballots.

We don’t need the system to be gamed by a Doug Mastriano any more than we did by former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.

But we do need it to be something we can believe in.