A Philadelphia County election worker processes absentee ballots on Election Day.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
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Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
In a new decision The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday ordered all county election officials across the state not to count some mail-in ballots for this year’s general election that arrived on time but in envelopes without the correct dates handwritten by voters.
The order, motivated by a request from the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, is the latest development in a long legal battle about what to do when absentee voters don’t follow an artifact of the state’s election rules. The provision, which requires a voter to sign and date the outer envelope of their ballot, has sparked a tangle of lawsuits since Pennsylvania began allowing no-excuse absentee voting in 2020.
Despite similar orders from the state’s high court before Election Day on what are often called “undated” or incorrectly dated ballots, some local election officials have moved in recent days to include these ballots in their official counts, provoking an outcry from Republicans.
Although state law requires a handwritten date on the return envelope, it remains an open question in state courts whether rejecting ballots for not having that date constitutes a violation. Pennsylvania Constitutionwhich states that elections in the state “shall be free and equal” and that “no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”
The RNC and David McCormick – the Republican candidate that the Associated Press declared the winner of the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania – filed two lawsuits last week against county officials who counted undated or improperly dated ballots, including in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a suburb north of Philadelphia .
“It’s a pretty stupid thing to not count someone’s vote just because they didn’t date an envelope for a ballot,” said Bob Harvie Jr., chairman of the county election board. of Buck and Democrat. said last week at a meeting before officials voted 2-1 to count 405 ballots that did not meet the state’s handwritten date requirements. “The law needs to be changed.”
The state’s high court, however, chastised local officials who voted for the vote by issuing an order that the justices said “must be authoritative and controlling.”
“No more excuses,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in an article on X after the court ruling. “Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia and other counties have absolutely no choice.”
The U.S. Senate election is undergoing a state-ordered recount as McCormick and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey are within 0.5 percentage points of each other. McCormick currently leads Casey by more than 17,000 votes, according to the latest unofficial returns compiled by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Casey did not concede the race.
Final results of the recount are expected on November 27. Recounts very rarely reverse an initial result, studies show.
Two years ago, during a recount of the Republican primariesMcCormick took the opposite position on Pennsylvania’s date requirement, argue in court that undated and incorrectly dated ballots should be counted.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey