PA court orders city, state to count mail votes with date errors

A Pennsylvania appeals court has ruled that election officials cannot throw out mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect dates.

The Commonwealth Court, in a decision issued Friday, Aug. 30, ordered election officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, as well as Secretary of State Al Schmidt, not to reject ballots with incorrect, handwritten dates on the outer envelope.

Nearly 10,000 votes were discarded statewide for such errors in the 2022 general election, and “thousands” more were disqualified in this year’s primary, according to the lawsuit instigating the case.

Should the ruling stand, the City Commissioners, who oversee elections in Philadelphia, would be compelled to count those votes in November. State and national Republican leaders argued in court against ending enforcement of the date rule and have indicated that they will appeal the decision.

A majority of Commonwealth Court judges agreed that throwing out votes solely because of incorrect or missing dates unconstitutionally deprives citizens of their right to vote. The dates are not used for any purpose. Scanned barcodes and time stamps mark when ballots are received, and no votes that arrive after 8 p.m. on Election Day are counted.

“It is therefore apparent that the dating provisions are virtually meaningless and, thus, serve no compelling government interest,” Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote.

Ceisler and her colleagues declined to strike down the entirety of Act 77, the 2019 law that includes the date requirement and introduced no-excuse voting by mail in Pennsylvania. It has been the subject of extensive litigation since the 2020 presidential election.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, in a dissenting opinion, argued that other members of the panel “discarded their judicial robes and donned legislative hats… all so that they might invalidate the simplest and perhaps least burdensome of all ballot-casting requirements.”

Democrats supported the lawsuit and praised the decision. Gov. Josh Shapiro called it “a victory for Pennsylvanians’ fundamental right to vote” in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Schmidt, a former GOP member of the City Commissioners, was named in the lawsuit but supported its goals. The Pennsylvania state department, in a statement, said the ruling “makes clear a voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be a cause for disenfranchisement.”

His department has altered the look of mail ballots in an effort to reduce the number of errors. Most recently, in July, his department updated the forms so that envelopes come with a pre-filled year. Some voters have mistakenly written in their birthdays, instead of the date they voted.

Election officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny County said in court filings that the dates serve no purpose, though they did not take a position on the case.

The legal action was brought by attorneys representing 10 civic engagement groups across the commonwealth, including the Black Political Empowerment Project, POWER Interfaith and the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania.

“No one should lose their fundamental right to vote because of a meaningless paperwork mistake,” said Ari Savitzky, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the case.