Pennsylvania Supreme Court Reaffirms Mail-in Ballots With Date Issues Won’t Count
In a divided ruling issued today, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court once again reaffirmed that mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect outer envelope dates cast in the November 2024 election cannot be counted.
The high court’s determination comes after the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Pennsylvania Republican Party alleged that multiple county boards of elections unlawfully opted to count undated and misdated mail-in ballots in contravention of prior Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent.
Democratic Justice Christine Donohue — who was joined by two other Democratic colleagues — dissented from the decision, writing that Republicans’ broad challenge to several county boards’ ballot counting decisions should have proceeded in the normal course as defined by state law, beginning in county courts of common pleas.
In a Nov. 14 petition, the RNC and state GOP maintained that county boards of elections in Bucks, Centre, and Philadelphia defiantly moved to count ballots that failed to comply with Pennsylvania’s handwritten date requirement.
The GOP litigants cited a series of rulings issued ahead of the Nov. 5 general election, as well as past decisions, in which the state Supreme Court made clear that the commonwealth’s date requirement would remain in place.
Republicans’ most recent request to preclude the counting of mail-in ballots with date issues came against the backdrop of a tight U.S. Senate race between Republican candidate David McCormick and incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
Last week, the Pennsylvania Department of State announced that it would initiate an automatic recount in light of the fact that the margin between McCormick and Casey is less than 0.5%. Currently, McCormick leads Casey by fewer than 30,000 votes, but the final results of the recount will not be released until Nov. 27.
Meanwhile, since Nov. 13, the McCormick campaign and RNC have filed five other lawsuits against county boards of elections in Bucks, Centre, Monroe, Montgomery and Philadelphia challenging their decisions to count mail-in ballots with undated or wrongly dated outer envelopes. Per today’s ruling, these counties must exclude such ballots from their vote totals.
Earlier this year, pro-voting groups made several legal attempts to strike down the commonwealth’s contentious handwritten date requirement, which disenfranchises thousands of voters each election cycle.
Pennsylvania’s highest court concluded in an Oct. 5 decision that it was too close to the upcoming election to upend the rule and alter the status quo, despite the fact that county boards don’t even rely on handwritten dates to determine the timeliness or validity of mail-in ballots.
Legal challenges to the requirement remain pending in federal court, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which could stand to affect future elections in the battleground state.