(Getty Images)
Pennsylvania’s highest court said Saturday that it will decide whether county election officials must inform voters if their mail-in ballots are disqualified so that voters can challenge the decision.
In a one-page order posted Saturday morning, the state Supreme Court said it would review a lower court’s ruling that Washington County election officials denied hundreds of voters in the April 23 primary election the right to cast a ballot and have it counted.
The Pennsylvania Republican Party and the Republican National Committee appealed a Washington County judge’s ruling in August that elections officials must inform voters if their ballot will not be counted because of a paperwork error and allow them to vote provisionally on election day.
Judge Brandon P. Neuman granted an injunction sought by voting rights groups to block a policy of not informing voters if their ballot was rejected because of an error that the county Board of Elections adopted just before the April primary.
A Commonwealth Court panel upheld the decision in a 2-1 ruling last month and the RNC and Pennsylvania GOP asked the Supreme Court to appeal.
With the presidential election on Nov. 5 exactly a month away, the Supreme Court ordered the Republican challengers to file briefs in the appeal by Wednesday at noon. The parties that originally fought the policy, which include the Center for Coalfield Justice, the Washington Branch NAACP, and seven Washington County voters have until noon Friday, Oct.11 to respond.
Since 2020, when voting by mail without an excuse for not going to the polls in person was first allowed in Pennsylvania, voters’ errors on the ballot envelopes have been a subject of challenges in every election. While numerous court proceedings have established that election offices don’t use the date that voters write on the return envelope to determine whether a mail-in ballot is received by the Election Day deadline, courts have continued to grapple with the issue.
The number of mail-in ballots that have been disqualified for such errors is not trivial. Despite efforts by the Pennsylvania Department of State to reduce the number of rejected ballots by redesigning the instructions and envelopes, more than 1% of mail ballots were rejected in the April primary election, according to one analysis.
By preventing voters from learning that their ballots were rejected and exercising that right, the Washington County policy “emasculates the Election Code’s guarantees” and violates the due process provisions of the state constitution, Judge Michael Wojcik said in an opinion for the Commonwealth Court majority. Judge Lori Dumas cast the dissenting vote but did not issue a separate opinion.
The Supreme Court said it will consider whether the Commonwealth Court panel erred by holding that the Washington County Board of Elections policy violated voters’ rights to receive notice of a decision, opportunity to be heard, and a review by a neutral decision maker.
The order said the court will also consider whether the Commonwealth Court erred in affirming the county court’s injunction, which orders county elections officials to:
Notify voters whose ballots are set aside because of a disqualifying error such as an incorrect date so that they have a chance to challenge the decision;
Enter the accurate status of the ballot in the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors system maintained by the Department of State; and
Properly document the voters’ status as not having voted in poll books, which would allow voters whose mail-in ballots are rejected to cast provisional ballots.
The Supreme Court has also agreed to hear an appeal in a Butler County dispute over whether elections officials must count provisional ballots cast by voters who learn that their mail-in ballots have been rejected because of a paperwork error.
The American Civil Liberties Union has also asked the Supreme Court to use its authority to hear any case to resolve the overarching question of whether the date on mail ballot return envelopes are required.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.