Republicans ask Pennsylvania court to delay decision on mail-in ballot envelope rules

HARRISBURG, PA— Republicans wasted no time in appealing a Pennsylvania court decision that loosened mail-in voting rules and asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a lower court decision issued a day earlier.

The state and national Republican Party has filed an emergency request that the justices stay a Commonwealth Court ruling that the envelopes voters use to mail ballots do not have to be precisely dated by hand, as required by state law.

Republican groups said that if the high court doesn’t uphold the ruling, it should at least modify it, saying it doesn’t stand for the vote that ends Tuesday.

The Commonwealth Court ruled in a 3-2 decision that 69 mail ballots with missing or inaccurate dates must be counted in Philadelphia’s two special House elections held in September.

The judges stressed that they were ruling on elections that had already taken place in which unopposed candidates had contested, but there was uncertainty about how that might apply to the current general election. Pennsylvania is the largest swing state in a close presidential race, and its voters also decide the U.S. Senate, three state offices and much of the Legislature.

Mail-in ballot rules in Pennsylvania have been frequently challenged in state and federal courts since the Legislature allowed all registered voters to vote absentee and vote by mail in 2019, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said requiring an exact handwritten date was feasible, and in April the state redesigned the envelopes to make it more difficult for voters to make dating errors. The state Supreme Court last month rejected an attempt to overturn the dating requirement and said Oct. 5 it would not revisit the issue.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that the decision was made too close to Election Day, county election officials should have been given a chance to weigh in, and the state Supreme Court recently issued another ruling on the same topic.

“Without intervention from this court, county boards are thus likely to count undated ballots that the General Assembly determines should not be counted,” they wrote in a document filed Thursday. They cautioned that the single date requirement could be applied differently across the state.

“There is no justification—none—for the majority’s rush to invalidate the demand for a General Assembly date less than a week before the 2024 general election,” they wrote in an emergency declaration.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave the other parties until Friday morning to respond.

In two decisions over the past two months, the state Supreme Court upheld the outer envelope date mandate and said the high court does not want existing laws or procedures to change significantly “during the upcoming election.”

The Commonwealth Court majority said that requiring precise outer envelope dates that are not needed to determine whether a ballot arrived on time conflicts with the state’s constitutional provision that elections must be free and equal and that no civil or military authority can interfere with them. elections. “free exercise of the right to vote.”

Scolforo writes for the Associated Press.