Pennsylvania’s top election officials have urged the state Supreme Court to issue a ruling ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election that voters should not be disenfranchised for forgetting to put a date on their mail-in ballots.
In a brief filed Friday morning, the Pennsylvania Department of State joined voting rights groups and state and national Democratic parties in calling to uphold a lower court’s ruling that the date requirement violates Pennsylvanians’ fundamental right to vote.
The department, led by former Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, argued that in addition to protecting voter rights, upholding the ruling that the date requirement should not be enforced would reduce work and eliminate uncertainty for election workers.
The department said that granting the request of the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party to delay enforcement of the lower court’s ruling would also not prevent additional challenges to decisions made by county boards of elections about which ballots should be included.
“It is almost always better to ask questions about which ballots will be counted before the election when their impact on the results is unknown,” the department’s briefing said.
The case is the latest in a long series of lawsuits and appeals seeking to resolve the issue, which has disenfranchised thousands of voters and delayed the results of every election since 2020, when no-excuse absentee voting initially became possible.
Pennsylvania officials continue to race the clock on Election Day to count mail-in votes
It follows a 3-2 decision Wednesday by a Commonwealth Court panel in a lawsuit filed by two Philadelphia voters that the envelope-dating requirement is unconstitutional because it denies the right to vote for minor and inconsequential errors and serves no purpose. compelling government purpose.
This ruling largely followed the Commonwealth Court’s August 30 decision in this case thrown out by the Supreme Court due to a procedural error. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court denied a request to review the issue filed by voting rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the public.
In its ruling of October 5, the Supreme Court said that the risk of confusing voters with a change in voting rules was too great.
“This Court will not impose or tolerate significant changes to existing laws and procedures in anticipation of the ongoing election,” the unsigned order said.
Chief Justice Debra Todd filed a dissenting brief arguing that voters and election officials need guidance for the upcoming election.
“We should resolve this important constitutional issue now, before ballots may be improperly rejected and voters may be disenfranchised,” Todd said.
In a case currently before the Supreme Court, voters Brian Baxter and Susan Kinnery sued the Philadelphia Board of Elections after their absentee ballots were among 69 rejected during a special election for House seats due to missing or incorrect dates.
A judge in Philadelphia ruled in favor of Baxter and Kinnery that the ballots should be counted and an appeal filed by the election board. Both voters were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center, which also asked the Supreme Court to rule the case before Election Day in favor of counting undated ballots.
In the Commonwealth Court’s majority opinion, Justice Ellen Ceisler found, as the court did in its August ruling, that various courts have determined that handwriting the date makes no sense and therefore disqualifying undated ballots deprives voters of a fundamental right and is unconstitutional.
“We cannot tolerate any election regulation law, whether declared mandatory or not, whose practical effect in its application is an unacceptable infringement of the fundamental right of some people to vote,” Ceisler said.
The Department of State said it agreed with the Supreme Court’s position on the possibility that slow changes in voting rules could disrupt election administration or confuse voters, but added that “not all changes in election procedures are created equal.”
“The requirement that county commissions set aside absentee ballots with filing date errors – and, in particular, the requirement to set aside mail-in envelopes with “incorrect” dates – placed significant burdens on county commissions.” “Election workers must manually review each ballot envelope to determine whether it has the ‘correct’ date,” the report said.
