Pennsylvania Court Rules That Election Officials Can’t Reject Mail-in Ballots With Wrong Dates
Jose Nino
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On August 30, 2024, the Commonwealth State Appeals Court ruled that the state’s legal mandate for mail-in ballot envelopes to have dates written violates the state constitution.
“Simply put, the refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely received mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote recognized in and guaranteed by the free and equal elections clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote in the majority opinion, where four judges found the states requirement to be unconstitutional, and only one judge upheld the states requirement.
The ruling is applicable to both Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, and overturned a 2019 law – Act 77 – which featured a provision mandating voters to To add a date to the envelope in which the mail-in ballots are placed.
According to an Epoch Times report, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged that and other provisions, contending that they are unconstitutional. The ACLU sued Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, the Philadelphia County Board of Elections, and the Allegheny County Board of Elections.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party and the Republican National Committee got involved in the case and argued that the provisions are not unconstitutional.
The four judges in the majority did not rule against other provisions, but specifically stated that the date mandate is unconstitutional
In a post on X, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro declared that the court “got it right: an eligible voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be cause for disenfranchisement.”
The appeals court said in the ruling that officials still have the power to ensure that mail-in ballots abide by other requirements, which includes deadlines for submission.
Pennsylvania’s Department of State announced that “multiple court cases have now confirmed that the dating of a mail-in ballot envelope, when election officials can already confirm it was sent and received within the legal voting window, provides no purpose to election administration.”
Per data presented before the court, over 10,000 mail-in ballots were not counted during the 2022 midterm election and 4,000 were thrown out in the primary elections earlier in 2024 due to how the ballots did not abide by the ballot date requirement.
Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough explained in a dissenting opinion that the date requirement was “perhaps the least burdensome of all ballot-casting requirements” and that the organizations that challenged the provision did not meet the burden of demonstrating that the requirement was so difficult that it effectively deprived voters of their right to vote.
“It seems to me that the majority was swayed by the raw numbers and avoided applying the true test for evaluating a Free and Equal Elections Clause claim,” she wrote.
“Today the majority says that requiring the date on the voter declaration on a mail-in or absentee ballot envelope is subject to strict judicial scrutiny and cannot be enforced because doing so unconstitutionally denies the voting franchise altogether. I must wonder whether walking into a polling place, signing your name, licking an envelope, or going to the mailbox can now withstand the majority’s newly minted standard.”
Pennsylvania is arguably the most important state in the current election cycle. For reference, in 2020, current president Joe Biden won the state by just over 1 percentage point (50% to 48.8%) in the presidential election of that year. So every vote will count here.
Any kind of rigging or measures designed to maximize turnout for Democrats makes winning the state much harder. The Right must go full-blown nationalist to activate the Keystone State’s disaffected populist base. This constituency will play a critical role in putting Pennsylvania in the populist win column.
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