Pennsylvania Counties Must Count Undated and Misdated Mail-in Ballots, Court Rules
In a 4-1 ruling, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court blocked enforcement of a law requiring election officials to reject otherwise valid mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect handwritten dates on their outer return envelopes.
The battleground state’s contested handwritten date requirement resulted in the disqualification of over 10,000 mail-in ballots during the 2022 midterm elections alone and several thousand more during the 2024 presidential primary.
Accordingly, today’s ruling stands to ensure that thousands of mail-in ballots won’t be tossed out in the upcoming presidential election.
There are dozens of lawsuits filed this cycle that aimed at expanding or restricting mail-in voting.
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In a 94-page opinion issued this afternoon, the four-judge majority held that Pennsylvania’s strict enforcement of the handwritten date rule for mail-in ballots violates the fundamental right to vote guaranteed by the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause.
“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote recognized in the free and equal elections clause,” the opinion reads.
Today’s decision stems from a state-level lawsuit filed in May by Black Political Empowerment Project and other nonprofit organizations seeking to stop Pennsylvania’s 67 counties from enforcing the state’s handwritten date rule for mail-in ballots. The lawsuit was the first to ever challenge the handwritten date rule as a violation of the right to vote provided by the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Some of the plaintiff organizations are also involved in a parallel legal action — which is ongoing in federal court — alleging that tossing mail-in ballots based solely on date issues runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution. A federal judge initially ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and held that the rejection of mail-in ballots based on missing or incorrect dates contravenes a provision of the Civil Rights Act, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision.
Both the Republican and Democratic National Committees (RNC and DNC) intervened in the case resolved by today’s decision, with the RNC supporting the policy of disqualifying undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots and the DNC opposing it.
In court filings, the DNC raised the fact that counties do not even rely on a handwritten date to determine the timeliness of a mail-in ballot — rather, election officials utilize the time at which a ballot is received and scanned into Pennsylvania’s mail-ballot tracking system.
“The date requirement…cannot provide a basis for denying Pennsylvanians their fundamental right to vote,” the DNC averred in a brief supporting the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment.
On the other hand, the RNC asserted that the date requirement advances Pennsylvania’s interest in “preventing fraud,” despite the fact that instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.
The majority in today’s ruling agreed with the plaintiffs’ arguments and concluded that “the date on the outer mail-in ballot envelopes is not used to determine the timeliness of a ballot, a voter’s qualifications/eligibility to vote, or fraud. Therefore, the dating provisions serve no compelling government interest.”
The judges further reasoned that because the rejection of mail-in ballots based on errors unrelated to a voters’ eligibility implicates the fundamental right to vote, the application of the handwritten date laws at issue are subject to the highest standard of judicial review — known as strict scrutiny.
“The dating provisions…are almost incapable of being enforced without resulting in disenfranchisement,” the majority ruling continued.
One member of the five-judge Commonwealth Court panel, Judge Patricia A. McCullough, dissented.
David Heayn-Menendez of the New PA Project Education Fund — one of the organizations involved in the lawsuit — said in a quote to Democracy Docket that the decision is “a win for democracy, for voting access, and for the future of our commonwealth” and “shows clearly why courts matter.”
In a response to the ruling, the RNC indicated that it plans to immediately appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In light of a recent announcement from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that it will expedite appeals for 2024 election cases, the RNC has three days to file a notice of appeal.
The state Supreme Court has previously weighed in on the issue of undated and wrongly dated mail-in ballots, but has never formally ruled on whether date-based rejections violate the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause.