DSCC and DCCC Seek To Participate in Pennsylvania Lawsuit Over Curing Mail-in Ballots
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Friday, Sept. 9, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) filed a motion to intervene in a Republican lawsuit challenging the ability of Pennsylvania county boards of elections to implement cure procedures for mail-in ballots that allow voters to fix common and inadvertent ballot defects on mail-in ballots. After the Pennsylvania Legislature declined to adopt a statewide cure process during the 2020 election cycle, county boards adopted their own cure procedures that enabled voters to fill in missing information on mail-in ballots, such as dates or signatures, so that they weren’t rejected for a technical reason unrelated to the voters’ eligibility. A group of national and state Republican entities are challenging the county boards’ adoption of cure procedures, arguing that the counties are overreaching their authority and creating “confusion and a lack of transparency in election administration.”
In asking to participate in this lawsuit, the DSCC and DCCC state that they want to defend the ability of county boards to develop cure procedures to fix immaterial defects on mail-in ballots so that ballots aren’t unnecessarily rejected. The organizations point out that a large majority of the state’s Republicans legislators supported expanding mail-in voting just three years ago, but since the 2020 election have gone on a crusade against this type of voting in a series of lawsuits. The Democratic groups suggest that this change in tone among the GOP is largely due to the fact that, during the 2020 election, “registered Democrats returned nearly three times as many mail-in ballots as registered Republicans, and more than three out of every five mail and absentee ballots in Pennsylvania were cast by registered Democrats.”