(Capital-Star photo)
Ten voting rights groups have asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to block enforcement of a rule that disqualifies mail-in ballots returned without a date.
Lawyers for the voting rights groups say that if county election boards disqualify ballots that are returned by the Election Day deadline but don’t have a correct date on the outside envelope, more than 10,000 voters could be disenfranchised in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
“The counties know that these ballots are from eligible voters. They know that they received the ballots by the submission deadline because they’re holding them in their hands. This requirement is meaningless for administering the election, but it’s damaging because it disqualifies otherwise eligible voters for a meaningless paperwork mistake,” Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center, said.
The new lawsuit comes less than a week after the Supreme Court dismissed a similar case in which a lower court found the rule was unconstitutional. In an Aug. 30 decision, a Commonwealth Court panel of judges ruled 4-1 that the dating requirement violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote.
The Supreme Court threw out that decision on a technicality because the voting rights groups had not included each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties as parties. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the lower court’s decision.
In the new suit that includes all of the counties’ boards of elections and Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, the voting rights groups ask the Supreme Court to use its authority as the commonwealth’s highest court to hear their case immediately. Although the Supreme Court seldom exercises its King’s Bench power, the “imminent disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvanians” justifies its use in this case, the groups argue.
They also argue that the requirement to date the return envelope of mail-in ballots violates the free and equal elections clause of the state constitution because the requirement restricts the fundamental right to vote but serves no compelling governmental purpose.
How election officials should handle voters’ mistakes in completing and returning mail-in ballots has been a subject of lawsuits since voting by mail without an excuse for not going to the polls in person was first allowed in 2020.
In prior lawsuits, testimony by election officials has established that the date that voters are supposed to write on their ballots is not used to determine whether the ballot is received in time to be counted. Rather, the county election offices put a time and date stamp on the ballots as they are received. Ballots received after polls close on Election Day cannot be counted.
The voting rights groups suing the boards and Schmidt are the New PA Project Education Fund, NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference, Common Cause Pennsylvania, The League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Black Political Empowerment Project, POWER Interfaith, Make the Road Pennsylvania, OnePA Activists United, Casa San José, and Pittsburgh United.
They are represented by the Public Interest Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, which opposed arguments against the dating requirement in the prior case, did not respond to a request for comment.