Activists Ask Pennsylvania Supreme Court To Stop Enforcement of Handwritten Dates on Ballots
A coalition of ten voting rights organizations — led by the Public Interest Law Center, ACLU of Pennsylvania, the AACP Pennsylvania State Conference, and others — filed a lawsuit on Wednesday asking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to stop enforcement of a state law that requires voters to include a handwritten date on the return envelope of their mail-in ballots.
The lawsuit is the latest development in an ongoing legal saga over the Commonwealth’s law that any mail-in ballots that have undated, or wrongly dated, return envelopes should not be counted, even if they were returned in time.
Pennsylvania has become a battleground for election disputes with more lawsuits filed than any other state.
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In a 4-1 ruling in August, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court blocked enforcement of the law, writing that, “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.”
But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated that ruling in September, due to technical procedural issues. In a 4-3 order, the court ruled that the Commonwealth Court lacked proper jurisdiction because the pro-voting plaintiffs didn’t include all 67 of Pennsylvania’s counties as defendants.
“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 in an emailed statement.
The new lawsuit names every county in the Commonwealth and asks the court to use its “King’s Bench” authority — essentially, a power allowing the state’s Supreme Court to bypass lower courts and hear a case first to make the ultimate decision —to consider the lawsuit.
“It’s time for the state Supreme Court to hear and rule on this issue on its merits,” Stephen Loney, senior supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in an emailed statement. “More than 10,000 eligible voters could be disenfranchised unnecessarily by this unconstitutional rule in the coming election.”
This isn’t the first time the Commonwealth’s law surrounding undated or misdated handwritten mail-in ballots has come under scrutiny. In the 2022 midterm elections, the issue came up and the court ruled that mail-in ballots with undated or incorrectly dated return would not be counted, effectively disenfranchising more than 10,000 voters. But the justices were evenly split on whether or not failing to count those votes violated the federal Civil Rights Act’s materiality provision. The issue is still being considered in federal court.