Pennsylvania Supreme Court Backs Republicans: Game-Changer for Misdated Mail Ballots

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled Monday that all county election officials in the state should not count certain mail-in ballots for this year’s general election that came in on time but in envelopes that did not have the correct dates scrawled by voters. The decision is the most recent step in a protracted legal dispute about what to do when absentee voters disregard a provision of the state’s election laws. It was requested by the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party. Since Pennsylvania began permitting no-excuse voting by mail in 2020, the requirement that voters sign and date the outside return envelope of their ballot has sparked a flurry of legal disputes.

Republicans were outraged when some local election officials decided to allow what are commonly referred to as “undated” or misdated ballots in their official tallies in recent days, despite similar directives from the state’s high court issued before to Election Day. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a voter leaves a mail-in ballot in October. Thousands of last-minute objections to absentee ballot applications were submitted to county officials in Pennsylvania; the majority of these challenges were withdrawn soon after Election Day.

State law mandates that the return envelope bear a handwritten date, but it is unclear from state courts if rejecting ballots without that date goes against Pennsylvania’s constitution, which states that elections “must be free and equal” and that “no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Including in Bucks County, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia, the RNC and David McCormick, the Republican candidate whom the Associated Press has proclaimed the victor of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, filed two lawsuits against county officials last week for counting undated or misdated ballots.

“It is a pretty stupid thing to not count someone’s vote simply because they didn’t date an envelope for a ballot,” said Bob Harvie Jr., a Democrat and the chair of the Buck County elections board, during a meeting last week. This came before officials voted 2-1 to count 405 ballots that didn’t comply with the state’s handwritten-date requirement. “The law needs to be changed.” But municipal authorities who decided to count these ballots were chastised by the state’s supreme court, which issued an order that the justices stated “shall be authoritative and controlling.”

“No more excuses,” RNC chair Michael Whatley wrote on X following the court’s decision. “Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and other counties have absolutely no choice.” Because McCormick and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey are within 0.5 percentage points of one another, the U.S. Senate race is in a state-mandated recount. According to the most recent unofficial returns published by the Pennsylvania Department of State, McCormick is now ahead of Casey by more than 17,000 votes. Casey has refused to give up the race.

On November 27, the recount’s final results are anticipated. According to studies, recounts almost seldom change the original result. When it came to Pennsylvania’s date requirement, McCormick took the opposite stance during a Republican primary recount two years ago, arguing in court that ballots that were undated or misdated should be counted.