The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered counties to stop counting undated and incorrectly dated absentee and mail-in ballots.
This is the second time the state’s Supreme Court has had to tell counties that the election officials cannot include these ballots.
The majority of the justices demanded Bucks, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties to “comply with the prior rulings of this Court in which we have clarified that mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the requirements of the Pennsylvania Election Code…shall not be counted for purposes of the election held on November 5, 2024.”
The order cites Ball v. Chapman: “The Election Code commands absentee and mail-in electors to date the declaration that appears upon ballot return envelopes, and failure to comply with that command renders a ballot invalid as a matter of Pennsylvania law.”
Three justices dissented.
The order should mean Republican challenger Dave McCormick will defeat incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey.
The race went into an automatic recount when McCormick’s victory fell below the 0.5% threshold.
The controversy started when a few blue counties defied the original order, given out a few days before the election, and counted the illegal ballots:
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said Thursday as she and other Democrats voted to reject a GOP-led challenge to ballots that should be disqualified.“People violate laws anytime they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.”
In Montgomery County, election officials chose to count 180 provisional ballots without the secrecy envelopes:
The Inquirer reported that several of these votes came from the same precincts, suggesting an error made by poll workers.Democratic board chair Neil Makhija voted to accept the ballots so that voters would not be disenfranchised. But other members of the board, including one Democrat and a Republican, voted to reject the ballots on the advice of county attorneys who determined the law clearly states they should not be counted.“We’re talking about constitutional rights and I cannot take an action to throw out someone’s ballot that is validly cast, otherwise, over an issue that we know … is immaterial,” Makhija said during Thursday’s meeting. The board ultimately voted to count a total of 501 contested ballots.
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