Supreme Court signals it will hear high-stakes case on Pennsylvania mail ballots

The U.S. Supreme Court signaled it will agree to hear a Republican bid to disenfranchise large numbers of voters by requiring Pennsylvania election officials to throw out ballots with missing or mistaken dates on the envelope.  

The court allowed Prof. Michael T. Morley of Florida State University’s College of Law to submit an amicus brief arguing for granting review and invited the Solicitor General to file its own brief “expressing the views of the United States.” 

The move strongly indicates the Supreme Court will take up the case, Eakin v. Adams County Board of Elections. 

The lawsuit stems from a 2022 challenge to the Commonwealth’s instructions to county election boards to reject mail-in ballots that were cast on time but either were undated or wrongly dated on the outer return envelope.*

The Democratic plaintiffs argued — and the lower courts agreed — that punishing someone with disenfranchisement for forgetting a date or writing the wrong one on an outer envelope is disproportionate to the error, and serves no purpose in ensuring the voter is legitimate. 

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, a Trump appointee, ruled that the 1st and 14th Amendments prevented election officials from spiking ballots over such trivial paperwork mistakes. 

“In this case, the weight of the burden on the citizens’ right to vote is not counterbalanced by evidence of any governmental interest,” Baxter wrote in 2025. “Accordingly, the enforcement of the date provisions does not pass constitutional muster.”

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision a few months later in an opinion written by Judge D. Brooks Smith, a George W. Bush appointee. 

“The date requirement seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency. By its nature, it fails to add solemnity to the process of voting,” Smith wrote. “And discarding thousands of ballots every election is not a reasonable trade-off in view of the date requirement’s extremely limited and unlikely capacity to detect and deter fraud.”

If the Supreme Court ultimately does take up this case, it will be a reversal of sorts, as the high bench decided against hearing a similar Pennsylvania case last year.

The issue has been the subject of numerous lawsuits in recent years, leading to confusion across the Commonwealth. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is considering a separate lawsuit which argues the instructions violate state laws. Multiple lower court rulings have found that disqualifying mail-in ballots with faulty dates violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause. 

Pennsylvania’s Department of State redesigned mail-in ballots envelopes in 2023 and again last summer to make the process less confusing to voters and reduce the number of rejected ballots. 

According to an analysis by the ACLU of Pennsylvania, around 18,000 ballots were initially cast with errors in 2024, but half were ultimately corrected and counted.

*The Elias Law Group (ELG) represented plaintiffs in this case. ELG firm chair Marc Elias is the founder of  Democracy Docket.