Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismisses ballot lawsuit over missing or incorrect dates

Thousands of undated or misdated mail-in ballots cast in the November election could be thrown out after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court ruling ordering those votes to be counted.

In a 4-3 majority ruling, state Supreme Court justices reversed an earlier decision from last month that held that ballots cast in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania could not be rejected under a provision of state law requiring Pennsylvania voters to handwrite the date on their ballot envelope for the vote to be counted.

But the justices ignored a lower court’s argument that the law unfairly disenfranchised people who would otherwise be eligible, and instead overturned the court’s ruling on procedural grounds, citing flaws in the way the case was originally filed.

The reversal, which comes less than two months before Election Day and just days before mail-in ballots begin being sent in a key swing state, marks another twist in a long-running legal dispute that has left the fate of ballots with missing or misdated dates in question in future elections.

But Friday’s ruling may not be the final word. Separate legal challenges to the state’s dating requirement remain pending before a federal judge in Western Pennsylvania and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice David Wecht, dissenting from his colleagues’ ruling Friday, questioned the decision to overturn the Commonwealth Court ruling without a full discussion of the case and said it was high time to finally decide the case.

“A swift and final ruling on the constitutional issue raised in this appeal is of great public importance because it will affect the vote count in the upcoming general election,” Wecht, a Democrat, said in a statement, joined by Chief Justice Debra Todd and Justice Christine Donohue, both Democrats.

The majority was made up of the four remaining Supreme Court justices — two Democrats and two Republicans.

The Pennsylvania Department of State in a statement released Friday shared Wecht’s opinion and expressed hope that the issue would be resolved as quickly as possible.

“Today’s decision is disappointing and leaves unanswered the important question of whether the dating requirement violates the Pennsylvania Constitution, as the Commonwealth Court has ruled,” said Geoff Morrow, a department spokesman.

Voting rights groups — including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Interest Law Center, which originally filed the lawsuit that the state supreme court ruled on Friday — have long sought to get rid of the date requirement, arguing that it serves no purpose because election administrators don’t apply written dates to determine whether a vote was cast on time. More importantly, they say, the requirement results in thousands of legally cast votes being thrown out each year.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party fought to uphold the date requirement, arguing that it would be inappropriate for a court to strike down requirements enacted by the state Legislature.

In its ruling last month, the Commonwealth Court agreed that the dated requirement served no valid government purpose and that throwing out undated ballots violated state-protected voting rights. It ordered election boards across the state to enforce the requirement only when necessary to prevent voter fraud.

The state Supreme Court did not respond to the reasoning of the lower court that overturned the ruling on Friday.

Instead, a majority of the justices found that the Commonwealth Court lacked jurisdiction to issue an order and that the plaintiffs had to sue election officials in all 67 counties in the state. (Their original lawsuit named only Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt and the Philadelphia and Allegheny County Boards of Elections as defendants.)

Steve Loney, supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said he disagreed with the court’s decision and was disappointed that the justices declined to resolve the issue. He said the organization will continue to work to eliminate the pre-Election date requirement.

The ACLU represents some of the plaintiffs in federal court challenges to whether invalidating votes because of missing or incorrect dates violates the Voting Rights Act.

Still, the Republican National Committee, which led the appeal of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, hailed Friday’s decision as a victory.

“The Keystone State will be crucial in this election, and the Supreme Court has delivered a major victory for election integrity,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.

Local and state officials tried to minimize the number of ballots rejected in the April primary by using novel envelopes that filled in part of the date for voters, leaving them to fill in the rest.

But the envelopes didn’t fully solve the problem. In Philadelphia, more than 400 ballots were rejected in the early election because they were undated or misdated. Statewide, nearly 8,000 votes were rejected because of problems with the date, signature or privacy envelope.